Feds Work to Eliminate Foot-and-Mouth Disease

Scientists from the U.S. departments of Homeland Security and Agriculture have developed the first vaccine for a strain of foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) that can be manufactured and licensed in the mainland United States. The U.S. has been free of FMD since 1929, but this vaccine will allow protection against some potential outbreaks like the one in the United Kingdom that followed 34 years of the region being FMD-free and resulted in the destruction of more than 10 million animals.

"This is the biggest news in FMD research in the last 50 years," said Plum Island Animal Disease Center Director Dr. Larry Barrett in a statement. "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."

There is no universal vaccine against the disease, which is known to have seven serotypes and more than 60 subtypes, which are present in Africa, the Middle East, Asia and parts of South America. But the DHS is preparing to develop vaccines for additional serotypes, Science and Technology Directorate Agricultural Defense Branch Chief Michelle Colby said in the statement.

Because traditional FMD vaccines possess the actual FMD virus, they cannot be produced in the U.S., nor is it possible to differentiate between an infected animal and a vaccinated one, which means detection of the virus usually results in the culling of entire herds.

"The absence of the nucleic acids of the real virus allows us to differentiate between vaccinated and infected animals," said Dr. Marvin Grubman, who originally discovered the vaccine seven years ago while working in the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service at the Plum Island Animal Disease Center. "This is critical when determining that an animal is free of infection after an FMD outbreak. Now it will no longer be necessary to destroy all the animals in a herd when just a few become infected."

The FMD virus contains genetic material surrounded by a coat of proteins, and the vaccine works by mimicking the protein coat without actually containing the viral genetic contents, thus triggering an immune response when administered, without creating any risk of infection and making it easy to differentiate between the infected and uninfected.

The disease, which is contagious and fast-spreading in cloven-foot animals, causes fever, blisters on the foot and mouth, loss of appetite, drooling and lameness. An outbreak of FMD in the U.S. could cost more than $50 billion, according to the DHS.