High potency, inactivated foot and mouth disease (FMD) vaccines may be used in non endemic countries for emergency vaccination during outbreaks in order to prevent virus spread. In endemic countries either standard or high potency vaccines are used for routine vaccination. Despite their wide use there is a shortage of data on the field effectiveness of inactivated FMD vaccines. Epidemics of FMD caused by viruses of serotype O occur frequently in Israel, where a high potency (>= 6PD(50)) vaccine is used for both routine and emergency vaccination. We investigated an outbreak of FMD caused by a virus of serotype 0, which took place during 2011 in a feedlot and an adjacent dairy herd. Post outbreak testing of antibodies against non-structural protein demonstrated that infection occurred in 96% of the calves that received two doses of vaccine at least three months prior to the outbreak and more than 50% showed clinical signs consistent with FMD. Replacement heifers that had been vaccinated 3-5 times with the last vaccination administered 7 months prior to the outbreak were all infected and 18% showed clinical signs. Testing of cattle sera of the same vaccination status as the affected cattle demonstrated low neutralizing antibody (NA) titers against the field virus strain and an r(1) value of 0.37 compared to the vaccine strain. In contrast, cattle vaccinated only once but up to two weeks before the outbreak, were almost all protected from clinical disease and to a lesser extent, protected from FMD virus infection, despite low NA titers. We conclude that emergency vaccination was highly effective due to a mechanism not associated with NA, whereas routine vaccination with the same vaccine formulation provided only limited protection due to poor longevity of the elicited immunity and low matching with the field strain (despite an r(1) higher than 0.3).

A wide range of arthropod-borne viruses threaten both human and animal health either through their presence in Europe or through risk of introduction. Prominent among these is West Nile virus (WNV), primarily an avian virus, which has caused multiple outbreaks associated with human and equine mortality. Endemic outbreaks of West Nile fever have been reported in Italy, Greece, France, Romania, Hungary, Russia and Spain, with further spread expected. Most outbreaks in Western Europe have been due to infection with WNV Lineage 1. In Eastern Europe WNV Lineage 2 has been responsible for human and bird mortality, particularly in Greece, which has experienced extensive outbreaks over three consecutive years. Italy has experienced co-circulation with both virus lineages. The ability to manage this threat in a cost-effective way is dependent on early detection. Targeted surveillance for pathogens within mosquito populations offers the ability to detect viruses prior to their emergence in livestock, equine species or human populations. In addition, it can establish a baseline of mosquito-borne virus activity and allow monitoring of change to this over time. Early detection offers the opportunity to raise disease awareness, initiate vector control and preventative vaccination, now available for horses, and encourage personal protection against mosquito bites. This would have major benefits through financial savings and reduction in equid morbidity/mortality. However, effective surveillance that predicts virus outbreaks is challenged by a range of factors including limited resources, variation in mosquito capture rates (too few or too many), difficulties in mosquito identification, often reliant on specialist entomologists, and the sensitive, rapid detection of viruses in mosquito pools. Surveillance for WNV and other arboviruses within mosquito populations varies between European countries in the extent and focus of the surveillance. This study reviews the current status of WNV in mosquito populations across Europe and how this is informing our understanding of virus epidemiology. Key findings such as detection of virus, presence of vector species and invasive mosquito species are summarized, and some of the difficulties encountered when applying a cost-effective surveillance programme are highlighted.

Next generation sequencing of pooled samples is an effective approach for studies of variability and differentiation in populations. In this paper we provide a comprehensive set of estimators of the most common statistics in population genetics based on the frequency spectrum, namely the Watterson estimator W, nucleotide pairwise diversity , Tajima's D, Fu and Li's D and F, Fay and Wu's H, McDonald-Kreitman and HKA tests and FST, corrected for sequencing errors and ascertainment bias. In a simulation study, we show that pool and individual estimates are highly correlated and discuss how the performance of the statistics vary with read depth and sample size in different evolutionary scenarios. As an application, we reanalyse sequences from Drosophila mauritiana and from an evolution experiment in Drosophila melanogaster. These methods are useful for population genetic projects with limited budget, study of communities of individuals that are hard to isolate, or autopolyploid species.

Modulation of the expression of chemokines and chemokine receptors in whole blood was compared following infection of pigs with high and low virulence isolates of African swine fever virus. Levels of mRNAs for CCL2, CCL3L1, CCL4, CXCL10, CCR1 and CCR5 were significantly increased in at least one time point following infection in two experiments and CCL5, CCR9 and CXCR4 mRNA were significantly increased in one of the experiments. The results showed that greatest fold increases in mRNAs for CXCL10 and CCL2 were observed following infection of pigs. CXCL10 mRNA was increased by up to 15 fold in infected compared to uninfected pigs. CXCL10 protein was also detected in serum from pigs infected with the high virulence Benin 97/1 isolate. Levels of CCL2 mRNA were increased in pigs infected with high virulence Benin 97/1 isolate compared to low virulence OURT88/3 isolate and this correlated with an increase of greater than 30 fold in levels of CCL2 protein detected in serum from pigs infected with this isolate. An increase in overall chemotaxis active compounds in defibrinated plasma samples from Benin 97/1 infected pigs was observed at 3 days post-infection (dpi) and a decrease by 7 dpi as measured by chemotaxis assay using normal pig leucocytes in vitro. Increased levels of CXCL10 may either contribute to the activation of lymphocyte priming toward the Th1 phenotype or induction of T lymphocyte apoptosis. Increased levels of CCL2, a chemoattractant for macrophages, may result in increased recruitment of monocytes from bone marrow thus increasing the pool of cells susceptible to infection.