23/24 February 2011 ~ "This rapid strip test is simple, easy and fast for clinical testing on field sites"
Yet another rapid on-site diagnostic test for foot and mouth. This one, developed by the Chinese to detect serotype A is a "simple and rapid colloidal gold-based immunochromatogarpic strip test"
"....no special instruments and skills are required and the result can be obtained within 15 min. To our knowledge, this is the first rapid immunochromatogarpic assay for serotype A of FMDV."
As Roger Breeze says below " the pen side dipstick tests for FMD and CSF are terrific in less developed countries of the world with difficult transport conditions and few human or fiscal resources. But they are surely irrelevant to the US, which pioneered on farm portable real time PCR testing for these diseases a decade ago to provide laboratory standard state of the art detection linked to a Command and Control System via the wireless internet." All we have to do is buy them - and use them.
There is not one single mention of them in the UK Contingency Plan.February 15th/16th 2011 ~ Pushing the hard decisions ever further down the road - the unbearable delay in getting vital tools "validated"
In November, there was a conference in Washington DC entitled "Protecting Agricultural Infrastructure: Defining the Needs and Requirements for Agricultural Screening Tools" The paper - as Dr Breeze points out - implies that APHIS lacks definitive modern diagnostic tools that are capable of QUICKLY and accurately identifying dangerous pathogens, mixtures of dangerous pathogens, and new variants of dangerous pathogens. Little wonder that in his email today, Roger Breeze, former Director of Plum Island, writes to say that such tools already exist - all APHIS has to do is buy them:
"Two that come to mind are the Tessarae re-sequencing microarray and the IBIS 5000. The Tessarae microarray identifies any of some 200 different viral and bacterial agents (and mixtures of these) in a single 5 hour assay that also provides about 1500 bases of the actual genomic sequence of any pathogen present, including new variants not seen before.
One shares the dismay that prompts Dr Breeze to write: "I have five sons and a daughter so I will add a codicil to my will, tasking a great-great-grandchild to check in on APHIS' progress in 2061".
The IBIS 5000 identifies any of hundreds of pathogens, including new strains not seen before, again in a single 5 hour assay. (Both these assays are performed at biological safety level 2 so there is no need for a high containment diagnostic laboratory ...." (email in full)
(We understand today from a despairing farmer in Kansas that the official response plan for FMD is, he was told, to "have a sample collected by the observing vet, then put in a State Highway Patrol car, and taken to Manhattan, with a "split" of the sample then Air Expressed to Plum Island.......no need for a Portable.")January 4th 2011 ~ "Just keep this email and change the name of the country when it happens."
Just a very few months ago, Dr Roger Breeze wrote to warmwell about the FMD crisis in Miyazaki:
"....You can't misdiagnose the world's most infectious virus disease in an intensive animal agricultural region full of cattle and swine for 10 days and not expect catastrophe....Governments keep doing exactly the same things and hoping for a different outcome each time. If it were mandated that all suspected FMD cases were to be tested by PCR on farm Japan would have had a 10 day start on trying to halt the outbreak while it was still small. Sad to say ...we know we will be writing much the same sometime soon - just keep this email and change the name of the country when it happens." Read in full
As for the dangers of relying on diagnosis by clinical signs alone, an English vet has pointed out that it's not just the delay in diagnosis that causes problems when clinical signs are used:"The main problem is its unreliability - there are a number of diseases that can mimic FMD and make accurate diagnosis very difficult - classically exposed in 2001 when sheep were such an important feature of the epidemic. Misdiagnosis was common (especially as more temporary veterinary inspectors with poor knowledge of sheep and their diseases were recruited without any assessment of their abilities) and the extent of misdiagnosis was subsequently estimated, acknowledged as almost certainly under-estimated, and documented in peer reviewed papers. The presence of, for example, foot rot, traumatic lesions and orf led to many sheep being slaughtered incorrectly - and this was nothing short of disastrous with a contiguous culling policy in place.
The writer ruefully adds, "I suspect that an accurate cost benefit analysis would have been a mortifying experience for those in charge, which is no doubt one of the many reasons why an honest appraisal has never taken place."October 8th 2010 ~ "...the 2001 foot and mouth epidemic was shaped by incessant War metaphors in newspapers and other media: the same narrative is being followed for badgers and TB with very negative consequences."
The letter received from Dr Roger Breeze this morning takes his usual refreshingly lateral thinking view of disease. The letter is mainly about the need for an entirely new way of thinking about solutions for bTB - but he refers too to the decades-old UK mindset about FMD control:
"As long as you believe killing is the answer there will not be a serious search for alternatives. The recent DEFRA report sets out many possibly valid reasons why PCR cannot be reliably used to detect bovine tuberculosis (a complex microorganisms with a large genome of some 4 million bases) in badgers or their environment. My confidence in this conclusion must be undermined by knowledge that DEFRA for the past decade has also believed, against the scientific evidence, that PCR (ie rapid on-site kits-see here) cannot be reliably used to detect foot and mouth disease virus (one of the smallest pathogen genomes known at 8500 bases) even when billions of virus particles are present in a readily available sample and many others are using the method successfully around the world. .."
As for using state of the art technology, he points to the breakthrough on bee disease announced yesterday in the New York Times in which university scientists and scientists in a Department of Defense laboratory got together to use a state of the art device in the military lab to identify the likely viral and fungal cause..." these US scientists had the impertinence to ask to use an advanced military device - built for an entirely different purpose - because it offered a chance to solve the question. You have to do what has to be done, not only what you have the tools to do yourself, to solve a problem."September 14th 2010 ~"It is just part of the process that people who have a hammer see every problem as a loose nail..."
"..in the case of FMD, scientific data and discovery in epidemiology, diagnostics and vaccine technologies have not influenced national and international policy in 40 years." In response to the post below about FMD field trials in the US of adenovirus vaccine, we have received an email from Dr Roger Breeze which can be read in full here. In essence, he says that the US trials that we had been so optimistic about are actually only to see what levels of antibody are produced in a larger number of animals than has been possible in the laboratory. The US effort to invent a FMD vaccine that can be manufactured in the US without starting with live virulent FMD virus appears to ignore the fact that this is something that has been technically possible for 20 years.
"...The world already has cheap and effective FMD vaccines .... the issue is not the efficacy of vaccines but the general lack of will to apply effective vaccination strategies!.... We have just eradicated FMD in South America - or very closely reached that point - with existing vaccines
... It was successful because finally governments and livestock owners got serious about using the tools that had been available for so long..." read in fullSeptember 14th ~ ProMed speaks of the hazard of FMD to neighbouring countries where FMD vaccination is not practised
As Dr Breeze says, the real challenge is to get the right vaccines administered in an organized and systematic way in developing countries so that these countries either eliminate FMD or have it firmly under control on a national and regional basis. As ProMed moderator, AS, said last Wednesday , it
"illustrates the extent of the losses caused by the disease in a country where FMD is endemic. It also demonstrates the hazard to neighbouring countries, particularly in Europe, where FMD vaccination is not practised."
Meanwhile we watch the situation in Turkey with real anxiety.September 2nd 2010 ~Why in 2010 - in Japan of all places - is anyone looking at a reported case of suspect FMD without the tools to make a diagnosis?
Back in June, in a longer email about the Japanese FMD situation, Dr Breeze, (who has no financial interest in any of these diagnostic kits), made the following points:
Read in full
- "An on-farm PCR test for FMD on April 9 (using the $50 Tetracore FMD real time PCR test, http://www.tetracore.com) on a $50,000 IdahoTechnology RAPID PCR machine (www.idahotechnology.com) would have given the answer within an hour....a preclinical test that detects FMD-infected animals 2 to 3 days before they show clinical signs of disease a pooled sample from several animals could have been used. The best science could have given the answer in one hour: in fact it took 11 days.
- And to confirm that infection, why does Japan not have the Tessarae resequencing microarray at the NIAH so that within 5 hours ALL the pathogens in the sample can be identified... ? A PCR-positive sample taken on April 9 could have been identified by microarray the same day along with actual sequence information - in fact it was 14 days later before the official confirmation.
How is it that on 19 April the local government veterinary service tests by PCR for all the diseases except the one that matters - FMD?....For the want of a $50 PCR test kit in the right place Japan is paying dearly.
- Why is the source of an FMD outbreak or infection always "unknown or inconclusive"? Why are we not applying modern microbial forensic tools to trace the virus to its source outside Japan by its biological signature (Carrillo, C. and Rock, D. Molecular epidemiology and forensics of RNA viruses, in Microbial Forensics, Editors Breeze, R.G., Budowle, B. and Schutzer, S. E., Elsevier, 2005, 174-185)? ..."
July 26th 2010 ~ "Objectively, a single, solitary sick water buffalo showing "fever and diarrhea" is not usually expected to become subject to suspicion of FMD"
According to the news report at www.asiaone.com the initial Japanese case is believed to have been at a water buffalo farm in Tsunocho in mid-March. The newspaper comments:
"The team believes effective initial response measures against the disease were stymied as a result of the detection delay of the real first case."
The ProMed moderator reminds us that the 1st case"had started already on 26 Mar 2010 ....and was diagnosed, by RT-PCR, on 23 Apr 2010, leading to the culling of the entire farm's population..Objectively, a single, solitary sick water buffalo showing "fever and diarrhea" is not usually expected to become subject to suspicion of FMD. It remains to be known if this animal showed other, more typical signs, such as oral lesions or lameness. Even if some oral lesions were seen, such (mucosal) signs could have been mistaken for a (rare) complication of bovine virus diarrhea (BVD), a globally distributed pestiviral disease. Additional details on the said buffalo, including its age, will be helpful. ."
and implies that no blame can be directed at anyone in Miyazaki for the delay. Instead, he calls for lessons to be learned - especially from the answer to the question: "how and from where did the virus (which circulates in China and South Korea) get into this Tsuno farm in the 1st place?"
Roger Breeze has written: "There are repeated calls for cheap, rapid pen-side tests that can detect FMD and other pathogens.... Such tests have existed for some years. The FMD real-time PCR test (and others for CSF, etc.) was always intended to be the trigger for regulatory action and response when used to detect and report infection, in close to real time, from the index farm over the Internet..." (See the 2006 OIE paper by Roger Breeze 'Technology, public policy and control of transboundary livestock diseases in our lifetimes') How very different would have been the lives of all those Miyazaki farmers if it had not taken virtually a whole month before their first most unfortunate FMD case was diagnosed.June 2010 ~ Letters to warmwell.com in response to the spread of FMD in Asia (particularly Japan)
August 2008 Email from Roger Breeze - re BBC article "Hope over 'quick' bird flu test"
September 25 2007 Response to Media request
Sept 2007 "DEFRA: The Triumph of Hope over Experience" September 2007
August 2007Dr Breeze on "Foot and Mouth again: Will Gordon Brown rise to the occasion?"
Dec 24 2006 Letter from Alex Donaldson to ProMed
November 2006 Letter (November 2006) from Dr Roger Breeze in response to Alex Donaldson's letter to ProMed October 2006
January 2006 Letter to Mary Critchley at warmwell (January 2006) from Roger Breeze Ph.D., MRCVS
( warmwell summary of Main Points in the letter.)
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