Contact:
Juanita Van Heerden (Ph.D); Tel: +27(0)12 529 9524
African
swine fever (ASF) is an acute haemorrhagic disease of domestic pigs,
which causes mortality and morbidity approaching 100%.
Currently
disease control methods are limited by the capacity of countries to
respond to outbreaks in susceptible pigs and lack of a vaccine. Once the
optimal vaccine is determined through experimental evaluation, the role
of immunity elicited by vaccination as well as natural infection will
be investigated. The reason that both vaccination and natural infection
will be used is that vaccination does not elicit strong antibody
response compared with natural infection. Live attenuated African swine
fever virus (ASFV) has been demonstrated to provide protection against
ASFV and the importance of CD8+ T cells has been demonstrated with these
attenuated viruses. Therefore it is currently hypothesised that cell
mediated immunity is important for ASFV protection and a vaccine that
stimulates cell mediated immunity may be a successful vaccine.
Project: Characterization of wild pigs' immune response to African swine fever virus.
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