Food securityA world free of foot-and-mouth disease within sight

The Departments of Homeland Security and Agriculture have developed a novel vaccine for one of the seven strains of the dreaded foot-and-mouth disease, paving the way for the development of the others.

One of the most economically devastating diseases in the world for those who raise cows, sheep, pigs, goats, deer, and other cloven-hoofed animals is foot-and-mouth disease (FMD). This highly contagious and fast-spreading disease causes fever, blisters on the feet and mouth (hence the name), loss of appetite, drooling, and lameness. Most herds affected are culled, as in the case of the 2001 outbreak in Great Britain when more than ten million animals had to be destroyed.

A DHS S&T release reports that traditional vaccines for FMD typically have three problems: first, there are so many different strains of the FMD virus that you must have a very well-matched vaccine to have any effect; second, traditional vaccines contain live FMD virus so they cannot be produced in the United States; and third, depending on a vaccine’s quality, it can be nearly impossible to determine whether an animal is actually infected, or has simply been exposed to the vaccine. Unless one can differentiate between vaccinated and infected animals, those animals vaccinated outside the United States with the traditional vaccine would be prohibited from entering any country that is designated FMD free. The United States has been FMD-free since 1929, but this is no guarantee that the disease will not strike again, as the United Kingdom learned in 2001after being FMD-free for thirty-four years.

Now, at the DHS Science and Technology Directorate’s (S&T) high-containment Plum Island Animal Disease Center (PIADC), located off the tip of Long Island, New York, scientists have produced a molecular vaccine against one strain of FMD, that 1) does not use a live FMD virus for vaccine manufacture, and, 2) can be used to differentiate an infected from inoculated animal using common diagnostic tests.

“This is the biggest news in FMD research in the last 50 years,” says PIADC director Dr. Larry Barrett. “It’s the first licensed FMD vaccine that can be manufactured on the U.S. mainland, and it supports a vaccinate-to-live strategy in FMD outbreak response.”

The new FMD vaccine, originally discovered by Dr. Marvin Grubman in the USDA Agricultural Research Service at PIADC, took seven years to develop and license. Dr. Bruce Harper, director of science at PIADC and the manager over PIADC’s Targeted Advanced Development Branch,