Abstract
Bovine ephemeral fever (BEF) is an economically important viral vector-borne cattle disease. Several live-attenuated, inactivated and recombinant vaccines have been tested, demonstrating varying efficacy. However, to the best of our knowledge, duration of immunity conferred by an inactivated vaccine has never been reported. In the last decade, Israel has faced an increasing number of BEF outbreaks. The need for an effective vaccine compatible with strains circulating in the Middle East region led to the development of a MONTANIDE™ ISA 206 VG (water-in-oil-in-water), inactivated vaccine based on a local strain. We tested the safety, immunogenicity and duration of immunity conferred by this vaccine. The induced neutralizing antibody (NA) response was followed for 493 days in 40 cows vaccinated by different protocols. The vaccine did not cause adverse reactions or a decrease in milk production. All cows [except 2 (6.7%) which did not respond to vaccination] showed a significant rise in NA titer of up to 1:256 following the second, third or fourth booster vaccination. Neutralizing antibody levels declined gradually to 1:16 up to 120 days post vaccination. This decline continued in cows vaccinated only twice, whereas cows vaccinated 3 or 4 times showed stable titers of approximately 1:16 for up to 267 days post vaccination. At least three vaccinations with the inactivated BEF vaccine were needed to confer long-lasting immunity. These results may have significant implications for the choice of vaccination protocol with inactivated BEF vaccines. Complementary challenge data should however be added to the above results in order to determine what is the minimal NA response conferring protection from clinical disease.
Highlights
Bovine ephemeral fever (BEF) is an economically important disease in cattle and buffalo, characterized by biphasic fever, anorexia, lameness and recumbency [1]
The disease is caused by a vector-borne single-stranded RNA virus—bovine ephemeral fever virus (BEFV)—and inflicts significant economic losses, mainly due to reduction in milk production [2]
The earliest BEF vaccines were based on field isolates of BEFV which were attenuated by repeated passages in suckling mice and/or cell cultures [3]
Summary
Bovine ephemeral fever (BEF) is an economically important disease in cattle and buffalo, characterized by biphasic fever, anorexia, lameness and recumbency [1]. Though commercial LA vaccines have been used in many endemic countries [4,5,7,8], their use is discouraged by some due to their potential lack of safety The fact that these vaccines contain attenuated live viruses carries the risk that these viruses might back-mutate to their virulent form [9], especially considering the relatively high mutation rate of RNA viruses [10]. The virus-vector vaccine is the most recently developed approach, using nonpathogenic live virus as a delivery vehicle for foreign DNA, inducing a sufficient immunity response against the inserted proteins Such a recombinant vaccine was constructed based on the insertion of BEFV G protein into the South African vaccine strain of lumpy skin disease virus [19]. We describe the safety of this vaccine and the dynamics of NA response following vaccination by several protocols
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