Aujeszky's disease

This is primarily a disease of pigs, which serve as the principal reservoir host. The secondary hosts include cattle, horse, sheep, goat, dog and cat but humans are refractory. The disease is caused by the Porcine Herpesvirus-I and it is endemic in many parts of the world. The disease cause heavy mortality in piglets; distress accompanied with high fever, listlessness and depression in growing pigs; abortion, mummification and fetal anomalies in pregnant sows. ELISA is recommended as a diagnostic test. FAT of frozen tissue sections, virus isolation, serum neutrilization test are used for  confirmation. Both recombinant DNA deletion mutant and inactivated vaccines are used, but these neither prevent infection or establishment of latent infection by the wild type of virus. A pseudo rabies vaccine from which both thymidine kinase and a glycoprotein gene have been deleted and the E1 gene of hog cholera virus inserted provides protection against pseudo rabies and hog cholera.