Why don most of the worlds industrialized countries who hold an FMD-free status vaccinate their livestock routinely with the current killed virus vaccine for FMD?
The short answers are that: Traditional serological FMDV diagnostic methods cannot distinguish vaccinated animals from infected animals. Thus, they believe that vaccination will complicate their FMD-free status. Vaccination using traditional killed virus vaccines may itself lead to disease outbreak, due to accidental contamination by live viruses during the vaccine manufacturing. Once a nation has eradicated the disease from an area, thus gaining FMD-free status, not vaccinating the animals with the currently available killed virus vaccine allows the country to maintain a sensitive means of detecting whether the virus has crept back in again, as any accidental infection will lead to a full-blown outbreak. However, this strategy of “non-vaccination” is a gamble. It assumes that the nation will be able to contain the outbreak by stamping out the infected herds quickly enough to prevent real damage and thereafter, in the absence of further outbreaks and vaccination, quickly regain its FMD
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