An international collaboration team (Principal Investigator: Prof. Wataru Yamazaki) of CSEAS, Vietnam National University of Agriculture, and University of Miyazaki has developed a highly accurate, rapid, and inexpensive test method for on-farm diagnosis of African swine fever. African swine fever is a viral infection that kills more than 90% of infected pigs, and there is no effective prevention or treatment. African swine fever has been spreading in China since 2018 and Southeast Asia since 2019, and is now pandemic. According to the World Organization for Animal Health, the economic damage in China is indeed US$141 billion (as of 2019). The economic damage in Southeast Asia is enormous, but is unknown as it has not been calculated.

Early detection and early quarantine activities are important to prevent the African swine fever epidemic. Conventional testing methods require expensive real-time PCR machines and reagents, so diagnosis is only possible in laboratories located in large cities. Time loss in sample transportation and expensive testing costs have been bottlenecks in early detection. The newly developed test method has various advantages: it is 100% accurate compared to conventional methods, costs less than 100 yen, takes less than one hour (conventional methods cost more than 1,000 yen and require three hours), and can be performed at the farm where the outbreak occurred. In order to promote early detection and early quarantine activities at the site of an outbreak, CSEAS has been collaborating with the Vietnam National University of Agriculture and the University of the Philippines, Los Baños, to introduce the newly developed test method.

This research was published in the online edition of the scientific journal “Veterinary Medicine Science” on April 3, 2023. This research is partially supported by the project “Japan-ASEAN Transdisciplinary Studies” of CSEAS, Kyoto University.

Researcher

Wataru Yamazaki　Kyoto University Activity Database on Education and Research

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