African swine fever (ASF) is a highly contagious disease that affects both domestic pigs and wild boar, causing high mortality and for which there is still no vaccine available. ASF, which is spreading in Europe and worldwide, poses a global challenge. Managing ASF in wild boar is key to the disease containment strategy, challenging conventional control techniques and requiring a paradigm shift based on innovative and adaptive solutions.
In this context, a new competitive research project has been launched in a public-private collaboration, funded by the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, the State Research Agency, and the European Union (FEDER), called ‘Transfer of Oral Vaccination Against African Swine Fever (ASF) in Wild Boar to Mitigate Introduction into ASF-Free Countries: Final Trial Phase and Field Acceptability’ (WildASF-Vax).
WildASF-Vax aims to complete the research and transfer of an oral vaccine that is being developed under the leadership of the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine and the Veterinary Health Surveillance Center (VISAVET) at the Complutense University of Madrid, and which has already shown its efficacy in wild boar. Unlike previous initiatives, which focused on domestic pigs, the project coordinated by MINUARTIA, and developed in collaboration with the veterinary team that develops the vaccine and the company GSP, focuses on its application to wild boar populations.
The objectives of WildASF-Vax include improving the stability of the vaccine, evaluating its safety in the most sensitive individuals, developing precise diagnostics tests to differentiate animals infected by the virus from those that have been vaccinated, modeling optimal vaccination strategies in various landscapes, and conducting a sociological study on the acceptance of vaccination at the Spain-France border. The aspects of connectivity modeling, analysis of wild boar movements, and socio-ecological analysis to assess the future cooperation of stakeholders in the application of the oral vaccine in wild boar populations are the tasks undertaken by the MINUARTIA research team.
