8. PREVENTION AND CONTROL STRATEGIES
African Swine Fever is devastating to the swine industry and currently,
there is no commercially available vaccine to control the disease
(Gaudreault and Richt, 2019).The development of vaccines against ASFV
has been almost entirely neglected, mainly due to the technical
difficulties involved in its development, gaps in knowledge concerning
ASFV virulence factors (Rock, 2017) and to the fact
that ASF was considered an ‘exotic’ disease
in developed countries. However, the situation has dramatically changed
with the recent emergence of the virus to Europe and Asia, threatening
the global swine industry. Efforts to develop ASF vaccines are ongoing
with different vaccine strategies. Among them, gene-deleted vaccines
have shown promising results in eliciting effective immune responses
(Chen et al., 2020; Borca et al., 2020; Reis et al., 2017; O’Donnell et
al., 2017; Monteagudo et al., 2017; O’Donnell et al., 2015a; O’Donnell
et al., 2015b). In absence of effective vaccines, the need of
implementing alternate measures of prevention is important and critical
to control the disease: