Vaccination against tuberculosis in badgers and cattle: an overview of the challenges, developments and current research priorities in Great Britain

Abstract

Bovine tuberculosis (TB) is a significant threat to the cattle industry in England and Wales. It is widely acknowledged that a combination of measures targeting both cattle and wildlife will be required to eradicate bovine TB or reduce its prevalence until European official freedom status is achieved. Vaccination of cattle and/or badgers could contribute to bovine TB control in Great Britain, although there are significant gaps in our knowledge regarding the impact that vaccination would actually have on bovine TB incidence. Laboratory studies have demonstrated that vaccination with BCG can reduce the progression and severity of TB in both badgers and cattle. This is encouraging in terms of the prospect of a sustained vaccination programme achieving reductions in disease prevalence; however, developing vaccines for tackling the problem of bovine TB is challenging, time-consuming and resource-intensive, as this review article sets out to explain.

Factors influencing veterinary surgeons’ decision‐making about dairy cattle vaccination

“…Similarly, Chambers and others (2014) discussed the need for inclusion of social science in vaccination studies, an area that has been widely used to examine decision-making in human vaccination (Hobson-West 2007). …”

Development of an improved ESAT-6 and CFP-10 peptide-based cytokine flow cytometric assay for bovine tuberculosis

“…Control of bovine tuberculosis (bTB) continues to be a major problem worldwide, in part because of the lack of a diagnostic assay that detects animals at all stages of infection [1] and because of the difficulty in developing a vaccine that induces sterile immunity [2]. Until recently, the major method to diagnose cattle with bTB in Egypt was through the use of the single cervical tuberculin test (SCT).…”

Cattle as Experimental Model to Study Immunopathogenesis of Tuberculosis

“…Following transcriptome studies, a protein, Rv3615c, has also been included in DIVA tests to raise the sensitivity. The evaluation of IFN-γ DIVA test using ESAT-6, CFP-10 and Rv3615c proteins in BCG-vaccinated, M. bovis-challenged and BCG-vaccinated, non-challenged cattle, has been documented with high sensitivity (96.0%) and specificity (95.53%) [73]. Several Th17-associated cytokine genes including IL-17A, IL-17F, IL-22, etc.…”