Word: omnivac
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Last week Main and other farmers were perplexed when the U.S. Department of Agriculture, under attack by critics, halted the sale of Omnivac-PRV, a new genetically engineered viral vaccine that immunizes swine against pseudorabies and may be the first of a whole generation of better animal vaccines. Main had participated in a field test of the vaccine last year by allowing 250 of his piglets to be inoculated. None of them or of others involved in the test contracted the disease, and in January the USDA licensed Biologics Corp., a vaccine manufacturer in Omaha, to put Omnivac...
Like earlier vaccines against pseudorabies, Biologics' Omnivac consists of pseudorabies viruses altered to prevent them from causing disease but still capable of triggering production of the antibodies that make swine immune. While the viruses in other vaccines are rendered harmless by conventional methods, the Omnivac viruses are altered by recombinant-DNA techniques--in other words, by genetic engineering, or gene splicing. Saul Kit, the Baylor University biochemical virologist who redesigned the virus, points out that existing pseudorabies vaccines, which raise no alarms, have also been produced by what is really a form of genetic engineering. One older vaccine, he explains...
Says Veterinarian Roger Saline, who supervised the test of Omnivac on Kevin Main's piglets: "I think they chose the wrong product to attack. The deletion work rendered the vaccine less virulent and less able to reproduce...
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