Improved Efficacy Test for Newcastle Disease Vaccines

US - US Department of Agriculture (USDA) scientists have developed an improved Newcastle disease virus (NDV) vaccine evaluation procedure that could be used to select better vaccines to treat the disease.
calendar icon 16 April 2015
clock icon 3 minute read

Newcastle disease, one of the most important poultry diseases worldwide, can cause severe illness in chickens and other birds. Severe, or virulent, strains rarely occur in poultry species in the United States, but they are regularly found in poultry in many foreign countries.

Available commercial NDV vaccines perform well in chickens infected with virulent NDV under experimental conditions. They also perform well under field conditions where virulent virus is not common. However, they often fail in countries where virulent viruses are endemic.

At the Agricultural Research Service's (ARS) Southeast Poultry Research Laboratory (SEPRL) in Athens, Georgia, microbiologist Claudio Afonso and veterinary medical officer, Patti Miller, have updated the traditional vaccine evaluation method, which does not compare vaccines or take into account suboptimal field conditions.

Under perfect conditions, vaccines should work, but conditions are not always perfect in the field, according to Ms Miller. Chickens sometimes get less than the required vaccine dose and do not always have the minimum amount of time required to develop an optimum immune response.

The improved vaccine-evaluation procedure compares vaccines made using genes from the same viral strain-or genotype-that the birds are exposed to in the field to vaccines made with a strain that differs from the virus to which birds are exposed.

Using the improved procedure, scientists inoculated chickens with different vaccine doses before exposure to a high dose of virulent NDV. Birds given the genotype-matched vaccine had reduced viral shedding, superior immune responses, reduced clinical signs, and increased survival than the birds vaccinated with a different-genotype vaccine. By using genotype-matched vaccines, viral shedding and death were significantly reduced.

Image above: ARS scientists have improved methods for evaluating vaccines against Newcastle disease virus, which could lead to better protection from this virulent poultry disease. [Image: USDA ARS].

Further Reading

Find out more information on Newcastle disease by clicking here.

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