Abstract
Veterinary vaccines play a vital role in the production of food animals by protecting their health and greatly reducing the need for antibiotics. Consequently, there is considerable interest in improving existing vaccines and developing new vaccines against agriculturally significant diseases. Key features of animal vaccines are that they must be effective, easily administered, affordable, and safe. The current issue of Viral Immunology features two articles focused on the development of vaccines against porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus (PRRSV). PRRSV is an economically important disease that causes respiratory illness in young pigs and failure in breeding. Currently, commercial vaccines against PRRSV, which consist of modified live or inactivated virus, reduce symptoms and viremia in immunized pigs, but efficacy against heterologous strains is variable. Yu and colleagues have investigated the immunoadjuvant effects of recombinant porcine interferon alpha (IFNα) on a killed PRRSV vaccine. The authors show that the humoral and cellular immune responses in pigs were markedly enhanced by IFNα after the coadministration with the killed vaccine. They propose that IFNα could be an important adjuvant for porcine vaccines.
The second article reports on the development of a new PRRSV vaccine. Elizondo-Quiroga et al. have expressed a chimeric protein comprising short amino acid sequences from the PRRSV GP3, GP4, GP5, and M proteins expressed in Escherichia coli. Their data indicate that this vaccine shows considerable promise for both PRRSV diagnostics and immunoprophylaxis.
Other articles in this issue of Viral Immunology address various aspects of the immune response to viral infections. Li and colleagues have developed a colloidal gold immunochromatographic strip assay for the rapid detection of bovine rotavirus (BRV). The strip exhibited high sensitivity and specificity for BRV detection, indicating that it could be a rapid, convenient, and effective method for the rapid diagnosis of BRV infection in the field. Tamoto and colleagues have examined the association between thyrotropin receptor autoantibodies and Epstein Barr Virus (EBV) in the context of Graves' disease. Their data demonstrate that low levels of autoantibody production coincided with EBV primary infection and lytic reactivation in children without symptoms of infectious mononucleosis. These data may partly explain why the onset of Graves' disease often occurs in young adults, but rarely in infancy. Finally, Haqqi et al. present a review of the prevalence of hepatitis C virus genotypes in Pakistan.
I thank all of the authors for their excellent contributions to the journal and all of the reviewers who work to ensure the high quality of articles published.