Characterization of Variant Strain of Newcastle Disease Virus in Egypt

A. S. Abdel-Moneim; Azza A. El-Sawah; M. A. Kandil

Characterization of Variant Strain of Newcastle Disease Virus in Egypt

2007

A. S. Abdel-Moneim | Azza A. El-Sawah | M. A. Kandil

During 2005, velogenic Newcastle disease virus (NDV) caused a major outbreak among commercial broiler chicken in Egypt. The outbreak raised concerns regarding the protective immunity of commercially available vaccines for prevention and control of this virus in poultry. The virus was isolated from broiler farm suffered from more than 95% mortalities. The isolate was confirmed not to be avian influenza virus (AIV) by rapid chromatographic strip test, and characterized as NDV using reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) which amplified a portion of the fusion gene of NDV and haemagglutination inhibition (HI) test. This isolate confirmed to be velogenic viscerotropic NDV by mean death time (MDT) test and pathogenicity to 7-week old chickens. We tried to determine whether the existing commercial live NDV La Sota vaccine could provide protection against the isolated virus or not. Birds received a single dose of live La Sota type vaccine at 3 weeks of age and were challenged 2 weeks postvaccination with a lethal dose of NDV. Results indicated that the live vaccine did not protect against morbidity but reduced mortality in comparison to controls. All unvaccinated control chickens challenged with NDV died within 5 days post-challenge (pc). Protection from disease did not correlate with the presence of antibody titers (determined by HI) at day of challenge. These results underscore the need to develop new NDV vaccines and vaccine strategies for use during outbreak situations to protect birds from both disease and infection and to reduce virus shedding.

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