Remind ’em to wash their hands 💦👏

Recent research conducted at the Institute of Virology and Immunology in Mittelhäusern, in collaboration with the University of Bern, has revealed that the hygienic status of pigs plays an important role in the development of African swine fever (ASF). So, remind your pigs to wash their hands (hooves, actually)! Seriously though, these results will eventually contribute to vaccine development.

• The complexity of the ASF virus explains the lack of a safe and effective vaccine. For the same reasons, and considering the high mortality rate of the virus, attenuated strains were used in the research.

It was discovered that domestic pigs with a very high hygienic and health status experienced a milder and shorter form of the illness followed by a complete recovery. In contrast, the lethality rate was 50% among farm pigs with a standard conventional hygienic status.

• A higher baseline immune activation was shown to have important consequences for the severity of the disease.
• The results are very important for the development of live-attenuated vaccines against ASF and for the understanding of host-pathogen interactions in hemorrhagic fevers.