OWN CORRESPONDENT, Ulongwe | Wednesday 9.30am.
SOUTH African scientists believe they have made a major breakthrough in the long battle against African Swine Fever with a Mozambique-based programme to develop pigs’ resistant to the killer virus.
The scientists say a herd of such pigs could be used as breeding stock which in time could replace the thousands of herds across Africa decimated by the disease. The virus has for decades ravaged herds of domestic pigs, and scientists have likened its devastating effect to Aids. Highly contagious, the virus kills over 95% of the domestic pigs infected, often with catastrophic economic consequences.
According to Pretoria-based Agricultural Research Council, an outbreak cost an estimated $4,5-million in an epidemic in Cameroon in 1982-83, with farmers compensated by the state. An eradication campaign in Cote d’Ivoire cost more than $11-million, and farmers were compensated at only one-third of the market price. In Benin, in 1997-98, pig producers lost more than $6-million. Having searched in vain for an effective vaccine for 40 years, scientists now believe the most viable solution is to exploit the genetic resistance found in certain African domestic pigs, and breed lines resistant to ASF.
A herd of 25 such pigs will shortly be shipped from the Mozambican research centre to Pretoria. There, they will be selectively bred in order to obtain a stable line of pigs with a high degree of resistance to ASF.
South Africa’s Onderstepoort Veterinary Institute’s Dr Mary-Louise Penrith’s team intends to find a genetic marker for resistance to ASF and use that marker to identify pigs for inclusion in future large-scale selective breeding programmes. Penrith’s team intends to find a genetic marker for resistance to ASF and use that marker to identify pigs for inclusion in future large-scale selective breeding programmes. New technical advances, which allow for the mapping of individual pig chromosomes through a so-called pig genome map, will help scientists screen resistant pigs for breeding.
The research — led by South Africa’s Onderstepoort Veterinary Institute along with the ARC — will involve the collaboration of a variety of scientific disciplines including virologists, molecular geneticists and pig breeding specialists in South Africa, Europe and the United States. –AFP