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Use of immunoassay technologies for the diagnosis and control of foot-and-mouth disease in Southeast Asia.
Proceedings of the final Research Co-ordination Meeting by the Animal Production and Health (APH), Joint FAO/IAEA Programme and held in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, IAEA-TECDOC-1150, IAEA, Vienna (2000).
Summary
Foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) is one of the most important diseases affecting livestock in Asia causing losses directly through reduced production (milk and meat and working time for draft animals) and indirectly through loss of export markets due to the presence of the disease in a country. Although vaccination and animal movement control are central to any FMD control programme, an ability to diagnose the disease and monitor the effectiveness of control measures is crucial. The matter is complicated by the presence of a number of sero-types of the virus that cause FMD and the need to identify these quickly in order to trace the source of the outbreak and select appropriate vaccines for control.
Until recently, the diagnosis and identification of virus types and sub-types and the characterization of the antibody response to infection with FMD involved a number of unreliable, cumbersome and expensive procedures including virus neutralization, complement fixation and gel electrophoresis. A further problem is that all these techniques are difficult to standardize and hence interpretation of results is subjective.
For ten years prior to 1993 much work had been focused on the development of ELISA technology to identify and characterize FMD virus types and the host's immune response to them.
The use of this technology within the framework of national and regional FMD control programmes has enormous potential to increase the capability of veterinary services to type FMD viruses and to improve the ‘match’ between vaccine and field strains. The protocols for doing this and the reagents needed have now been fully standardized by the World Reference Laboratory (WRL) for FMD in UK.
The Joint FAO/IAEA Programme on developing a system to transfer this technology to developing countries, worked with the WRL to develop FMD antigen and antibody detection ‘kits’. The antigen (or typing) kit was successfully validated in nine Latin American countries through collaboration between FAO/IAEA and the Pan American Foot-and-Mouth Disease Center (PAFMDC) in Brazil under an earlier FAO/IAEA Co-ordinated Research Project [2]. This assay is now being used routinely within the framework of national and regional control and eradication efforts in Latin America. In 1994, the ‘antibody kit’ was similarly introduced into Latin America for vaccine testing and for examining relationships between vaccine and field strains of FMD [2]. It was foreseen at that time that PAFMDC would eventually produce and distribute the reagents required, whilst the FAO/IAEA Programme and the WRL would focus on providing a quality assurance service.
Parallel to the above, in 1993 the recently completed ACIAR/AAHL/ Government of Thailand Project on FMD had also shown the immense value of ELISA-based systems for the diagnosis and control of FMD within Thailand. An ACIAR Workshop in Lampang, Thailand, (September 1993) considered the results of this project and reports from 12 Asian countries on their FMD situation. The meeting strongly concluded that, in the absence of effective animal movement controls in this region, individual national efforts would achieve little and that the only realistic way forward to controlling and eventually eradicating FMD in Southeast Asia was to consider a regionally-based approach (national vaccination programmes alone cost the region US $380 million annually). It was recommended that an essential component for such a regionally based control and eradication programme be for each country in the region to have, as a minimum, an ELISA testing capability for the detection of FMD virus and for assessing the antibody status of their livestock populations.
In response to this, a new FAO/IAEA CRP entitled "Improved diagnosis of foot-and-mouth disease in Southeast Asia using ELISA-based technologies" was established with the objective of bringing together the expertise available in the Joint FAO/IAEA Programme, the WRL and the AAHL to help establish an FMD diagnostic capability within countries of the region and subsequently to use this to develop and monitor control and eradication programmes. It was considered from the outset that this CRP would function within the framework of the OIE/FAO/ACIAR Control and Eradication Programme for FMD in Southeast Asia.
Contact: aph-webcontact@iaea.org.