China Says African Swine Fever Vaccine Effective in Lab Tests
China’s Harbin Veterinary Research Institute, the country’s top research body on animal diseases, said it developed an African swine fever vaccine that laboratory testing has showed is safe and effective.
The institute, which is overseen by the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, said the live vaccine with reduced virulence was created from a series of gene-deleted viruses using the country’s first African swine fever strain as a backbone.
The disease, which is deadly for pigs but isn’t known to harm humans, first broke out in China in 2018. Since then, hog herds in the world’s top consumer and producer of pork have fallen by nearly half as global researchers looked to develop the world’s first African swine fever vaccine.
“The vaccine is currently the most promising one for commercial production and will provide important technical means for the effective prevention and control of African swine fever in China and other related countries,” the Harbin institute said. It did not give an outlook on when the vaccine will be put into production.
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