UK: Synthetic foot-and-mouth vaccine could reduce risk of live virus escaping labs

[Emily]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/agriculture/farming/9957568/Synthetic-foot-and-mouth-vaccine-developed.html

By Nick Collins, Science Correspondent
10:00PM GMT 27 Mar 2013

Synthetic foot-and-mouth vaccine developed

Previous vaccines for the disease, which affects cattle, sheep and pigs in the UK, have used small amounts of the live virus which allow animals to develop immunity.

But authorities often decide to cull animals instead because manufacturing such a vaccine in the lab risks a release into the wild, as happened in 2007 when the virus escaped from the Pirbright Laboratory in Surry and caused a local outbreak...

Final report on potential breaches of biosecurity at the Pirbright site 2007