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1. Sampling reveals CWD positive deer in Pope county [AR]
By Associated Press
Stuttgart Daily Leader
April 26, 2016
LITTLE ROCK - The Arkansas Game and Fish Commission has received confirmation that two additional deer have tested positive for chronic wasting disease in Arkansas. A deer in Madison County and another deer in Pope County were positive for the fatal disease. Both deer were road kills that were reported by the public.
The Madison County deer was a 2�-year-old doe found near Kingston and 2.9 miles west of the CWD focal area. The Pope County deer was a 2�-year-old buck found 44.4 miles south of the focal area near London. The two positive samples came from a batch of 131 deer sent to the Wisconsin Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory in Madison.
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2. New biosecurity measures enacted to help prevent avian influenza [IA]
By Will Musgrove, Staff Writer
Dickinson County News
April 26, 2016
Poultry farmers across Iowa had to destroy millions of birds, lost months of production and were impacted financially due to the avian influenza last year.
This year, they plan on being better prepared.
New biosecurity measures were implemented this year to prevent another outbreak. Avian influenza infected more than 48 million birds in 21 states in 2015.
"All we can do is reduce a risk of an outbreak of the influenza," Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Bill Northey said. "We know that all these things may still not be enough to stop an outbreak. We want to find and prevent it as quick as we can and minimize the spread of the disease as much as we can. Being successful doesn't mean that we are going to stop any case from happening."
All poultry farms now need to have a biosecurity plan to qualify for USDA indemnification, according to Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship.
The Center for Food Security and Public Health and Iowa State University, College of Veterinary Medicine developed the new plan. It ranges from ways to dispose of dead birds to measures to prevent infection.
Northey said it is recommended that livestock houses have an official identification number. These numbers may be obtained at no charge by contacting the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship.
Northey encourages producers to be aggressive in surveillance of their birds. He said not to wait to report a bird displaying any symptoms of the influenza. Any bird infected must be removed within 24 hours to reduce the overall impact of the virus on the flock or on neighbor farms.
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3. Wyo. OKs CWD plan
By Mike Koshmrl
Jackson Hole Daily
April 26, 2016
A new chronic wasting disease management plan is on the books in Wyoming that orders wildlife managers to find ways to fend off the fatal and incurable elk, deer and moose disease.
Meeting in Casper on Friday, the Wyoming Game and Fish Commission approved a plan that has been in draft form since November. Commissioners sought no changes to the document, a second draft, which identifies specific goals like fighting the spread of chronic wasting disease and reducing its prevalence.
The plan also suggests steps, such as reducing elk feeding, that can be taken to achieve those objectives. Game and Fish staff announced at the meeting that they will convene a group to write a chronic wasting disease "action plan" that will be independent of, but in accordance with, the management plan.
"We're going to continue to explore what additional things that we can do on the ground to put this [plan] in place," Game and Fish Commissioner Patrick Crank said. "Obviously a critical thing we need to do is try to stop the spread of this westward and northward, because we're all deeply concerned about what happens if this hits our feedgrounds."
"Rather than be the control mechanism for the world," Crank said, "we're going to take some proactive approaches."
Mary Wood, the state veterinarian, said that Game and Fish personnel would meet to come up with some "actual active strategies" that can be deployed to fight chronic wasting disease, or CWD. At an earlier commission meeting Wood hinted that reducing feeding would be at the top of her list of strategies.
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4. Prevent the creation of BVD-PI calves [edited]
By Doug Rich
High Plains Journal
April 26, 2016
Contrary to popular opinion, BVD does not stand for bad veterinarian disease. It stands for bovine viral diarrhea, and it can be very costly for cow-calf producers and feedlot operators.
Speaking at the BVD Forum in Kansas City, Missouri, April 7, Dan Grooms, a professor in the College of Veterinary Science at Michigan State University, said BVD can cost producers $14 to $25 in decreased return per beef cow, and feedlot owners can lose $41 to $93 per animal exposed to BVD. The morbidity rate for feedlot calves exposed to persistently infected animals is almost double the rate for non-PI exposed calves.
Derrell Peel, a professor at Oklahoma State University Department of Agricultural Economics, said the economic impact of BVD is $20 to $30 per beef cow, $45 to $55 per dairy cow and $20 to $45 per stocker/feedlot animal. The impact for the industry as whole is $1.54 to $2.59 billion.
Dr. Dan Givens, a veterinarian at Kansas State University's College of Veterinary Science, said most BVD-PI animals occur in the cow-calf segment of the industry. There is no good way to test a calf for BVD until it is on the ground. At this point the producer is only six months away from the selling the animal and then it is halfway through the production process. Givens wondered if it reasonable to expect one segment of the industry to shoulder all of the costs for testing and control of this disease.
"BVD is one of the few disease that is easy to blame on someone else," Givens said.
It is estimated that 10 percent of herds in this country will have a PI-infected animal. However, a recent survey of producers with over 200 cows said that while they had knowledge of the disease, they were not testing for it. Givens said the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.
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5. Threat of Novel Swine Flu Viruses in Pigs and Humans
Source: eLife 12217
Infection Control Today
April 26, 2016
The wide diversity of flu in pigs across multiple continents, mostly introduced from humans, highlights the significant potential of new swine flu strains emerging, according to a study to be published in eLife.
While swine flu viruses have long been considered a risk for human pandemics, and were the source of the 2009 pandemic H1N1 virus, attention has recently turned to the transmission of flu viruses from humans to pigs.
"Once in pigs, flu viruses from humans continue to evolve their surface proteins, generically referred to as antigens, resulting in a tremendous diversity of novel flu viruses that can be transmitted to other pigs and also to humans," explains first author Nicola Lewis from the University of Cambridge.
"These flu viruses pose a serious threat to public health because they are no longer similar enough to the current human flu strains for our immune systems to recognise them and mount an effective defense. Understanding the dynamics and consequences of this two-way transmission is important for designing effective strategies to detect and respond to new strains of flu."
Humans and pigs both experience regular outbreaks of influenza A viruses, most commonly from H1 and H3 subtypes. Their genetic diversity is well characterized. However, the diversity of their antigens, which shapes their pandemic potential, is poorly understood, mainly due to lack of data.
To help improve this understanding, Lewis and her team created the largest and most geographically comprehensive dataset of antigenic variation. They amassed and characterized antigens from nearly 600 flu viruses dating back from 1930 through to 2013 and collected from multiple continents, including Europe, the US, and Asia. They included nearly 200 viruses that had never been studied before.
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6. NOTICE: CVB Notice 16-05 Initiation of the NCAH Portal for the CVB
USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service Bulletin
April 26, 2016
The Center for Veterinary Biologics (CVB) recently added CVB Notice 16-05 Initiation of the National Centers for Animal Health (NCAH) Portal for the Center for Veterinary Biologics to its website which may be accessed by clicking through the following link: CVB Newly Published Information.
The purpose of this Notice is to inform licensees, permittees, and applicants that the Center for Veterinary Biologics (CVB) is beginning the process of accepting submissions via the web-based NCAH Portal for APHIS Form 2007, Qualifications of Veterinary Biologics Personnel; APHIS Form 2008, Veterinary Biologics Production and Test Report; and APHIS Form 2020, Shipment and Receipt of Biologics Samples.
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7. First ever vaccine for deadly parasitic infection may help prevent another global outbreak
Source: Ohio State University Center for Clinical and Translational Science
ScienceDaily.com
April 26, 2016
As scientists scramble to get a Zika virus vaccine into human trials by the end of the summer, a team of researchers is working on the first-ever vaccine to prevent another insect-borne disease -- Leishmaniasis -- from gaining a similar foothold in the Americas.
Leishmaniasis is a parasitic infection passed on through the bite of a sand fly. Using breakthrough CRISPR-cas9 gene editing technology, the researchers -- hailing from Japan, Brazil, Canada and the United States -- have altered the parasite's DNA to create a live-attenuated vaccine. If approved, the vaccine will be the first ever to combat a parasite.
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