Editorial: Breakthrough With Bluetongue Vaccine

Bluetongue research in the UK will help scientists develop improved and more effective bluetongue vaccines.

Professor Polly Roy of London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine explains: "We've developed the tools and provided the instruction manual for developing new, more effective bluetongue vaccines. This will not only be useful for combating bluetongue but will provide insights into fundamental virus assembly that will be useful for producing vaccines for other viruses."

A new approach could allow scientists to design vaccines with useful properties. Developing a vaccine that is tagged with a marker, for example, would make it easier to tell the difference between animals that have been vaccinated and those that have suffered the disease.

The National Cattlemens' Beef Association summer conference began this week in Florida. Beef Checkoff Programme priorities will be discussed throughout the week, as well as proposals for research, educational and promotional programmes.

President Bill Donald said much of the attention during policy discussions will focus on the administration’s overregulation, which includes the US Department of Agriculture’s Grain Inspection, Packers and Stockyards Administration’s proposed rule on livestock and poultry marketing, a slew of regulations proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency and government mandates for ethanol production.

The drought continues in the South of the US. The USDA's weekly crop progress update reported that up to as much as 35 per cent of the nation's range and pasture land was in either poor or very poor condition. This is bad news for cattle ranchers.