ciab.expert | Вебінари CIAB з вакцинопрофілактики АЧС

30 January 2024 // Livestock News

In his blog, Andriy Ihorovych Buzun, an expert in African Swine Fever (ASF) outbreak prevention at the Center for Livestock Efficiency Improvement, explains why it is essential for Ukrainian pig farmers to take the online training course on preventing ASF outbreaks through vaccination.

Ukraine’s commercial pig farming sector is currently facing difficult times. As a crucial part of the country’s rear-line food supply system and a means of supporting the civilian population affected by a brutal war for survival, the industry is under severe pressure. The turbulent epizootic situation with ASF has been building since 2012, peaking between 2014 and 2019. By late 2023 and early 2024, a new wave of ASF outbreaks has emerged in Ukraine.

The CIAB qualification enhancement course, designed for veterinary professionals and managers in the pig and meat industries, aims to equip participants with foundational knowledge about the drivers of this epizootic process. The course serves as proof of the need to include vaccination in the comprehensive set of anti-epizootic measures.

African Swine Fever (ASF) was first identified in 1921 by British veterinarian Robert Eustace Montgomery in Kenya. And up until the first decade of the current millennium, despite incredibly deep scientific efforts, substantial financial investment, and a broad range of approaches, humanity has failed to control this disease. This stands in stark contrast to the "taming" of 99.99% of other infectious diseases that were once just as incompatible with industrial pig farming.

Unfortunately, even today, the primary method of saving national pig farming remains the harshest of all known response strategies — the complete bloodless destruction of all pigs, products, and waste within ASF outbreak zones, known as “stamping out.”

Can our industry survive under such conditions — especially during wartime? And will pig farmers truly resort to culling entire herds on farms in case of an ASF outbreak, when this requirement was often ignored even during peacetime?

Only now is the global pig industry approaching the adoption of effective, environmentally compatible, and cost-efficient control technologies.
This progress began with the undeniable success of international collaboration between talented scientists from the United States, Vietnamese biotechnologists, and the respective governmental institutions of both countries.

How did this breakthrough happen? What challenges were overcome — and which still lie ahead? Most importantly, why can't ASF vaccination be reduced to simply "injecting water from syringes," as is common for 99.99% of other swine diseases? These crucial questions will be addressed in detail during the CIAB webinars.

Drawing on recently established patterns of the ASF epizootic process, the webinars will examine why, after the successful use of certain types of ASF vaccines in 2022, an emergent situation arose during the post-vaccination period in some regions of Vietnam — and how such issues must be avoided in the future.

Using real-world examples from the AVAC company, the challenges of implementing ASF vaccination in the competitive environment of modern pig farming will be discussed.

Reminder:
Andriy Ihorovych Buzun is the lead lecturer of the online course on preventing ASF through vaccination. More information is available via the link below.