Classical swine fever in pigs: recent developments and future perspectives

Abstract

Classical swine fever (CSF) is one of the most devastating epizootic diseases of pigs, causing high morbidity and mortality worldwide. The diversity of clinical signs and similarity in disease manifestations to other diseases make CSF difficult to diagnose with certainty. The disease is further complicated by the presence of a number of different strains belonging to three phylogenetic groups. Advanced diagnostic techniques allow detection of antigens or antibodies in clinical samples, leading to implementation of proper and effective control programs. Polymerase chain reaction (PCR)-based methods, including portable real-time PCR, provide diagnosis in a few hours with precision and accuracy, even at the point of care. The disease is controlled by following a stamping out policy in countries where vaccination is not practiced, whereas immunization with live attenuated vaccines containing the 'C' strain is effectively used to control the disease in endemic countries. To overcome the problem of differentiation of infected from vaccinated animals, different types of marker vaccines, with variable degrees of efficacy, along with companion diagnostic assays have been developed and may be useful in controlling and even eradicating the disease in the foreseeable future. The present review aims to provide an overview and status of CSF as a whole with special reference to swine husbandry in India.

Molecular approaches to the diagnosis and monitoring of production diseases in pigs

“…Novel pathogens can also be detected by using generic or degenerate primers (Tong et al, 2008;Bexfield and Kellam, 2011). qPCR is often used in the diagnosis and detection of economically important pathogens including classical swine fever (Chander et al, 2014) and African swine fever (Oura et al, 2013), the emerging porcine delta coronaviruses (Zhang, 2016) and porcine epidemic diarrhoea virus (Diel et al, 2016). qPCR was regarded as a relatively low-throughput assay, limiting the number of samples that could be tested simultaneously and as a result, researchers have looked at ways of increasing throughput, for example by combining it with microfluidic assays such as the BioMark™ qPCR system which produces data which correlates well with conventional qPCR and reportedly gives better reproducibility than DNA microarrays (Spurgeon et al, 2008).…”

Apoptosis, Autophagy, and Pyroptosis: Immune Escape Strategies for Persistent Infection and Pathogenesis of Classical Swine Fever Virus

“…However, under immune selection pressure, CSFV has evolved and developed mechanisms that escape the host immune response, resulting in an outbreak of CSF or establishing persistent infection in an immune flock [9][10][11]. Although many studies have investigated the interaction mechanism between CSFV and the host, the pathogenesis and immune escape mechanism of CSFV still remain unclear [12][13][14][15]. It is still necessary to explore the pathogenic mechanisms of CSFV in order to develop specific drugs and vaccines for effective CSF prevention, control, and eradication.…”

A Simulation Model to Determine Sensitivity and Timeliness of Surveillance Strategies

“…Classical swine fever (CSF) is a contagious viral disease that can affect all suid species (Kaden et al., ; Chander et al., ). The occurrence of CSF in a domestic pig population can inflict huge economic losses, which makes it necessary to prevent the introduction of this virus into disease‐free areas (Saatkamp et al., ; Meuwissen et al., ; Chander et al., ). Fritzemeier et al.…”