October 4, 2001

USDA Foot and Mouth Disease Researcher At NDSU Oct. 19

One of the USDA’s leading researchers on foot and mouth disease will be at North Dakota State University on Oct. 19.

Peter Mason, research leader of the foot and mouth disease research unit at the USDA’s Plum Island Animal Disease Center, will give a seminar on the disease and recent research findings at 4 p.m. in 101 Van Es Hall on the NDSU Campus. He will discuss recent outbreaks of foot and mouth disease and the possibility that the disease is changing the way it infects animals as well as the animals it infects.

Plum Island is an 840-acre island about 1.5 miles northeast of Orient Point, N.Y. Congress passed legislation in the 1950s that made it illegal to possess live foot-and-mouth virus on the U.S. mainland—even in the form of protective vaccines. That law made Plum Island the only place in the United States where foot and mouth disease can be studied.

Mason’s research has focused on using biotechnology techniques to create forms of the foot and mouth disease virus that do not cause disease. These forms of the virus could be used to create new vaccines. In the past, vaccines have used inactivated virus, and research has shown that vaccine production facilities and the vaccines themselves have been sources of infection. An additional problem has been telling the difference between animals that have been vaccinated from those that carry the disease. Mason’s research could help solve both those problems.

Mason’s seminar is free and open to the public.

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Source: Nicky Bratanich, (701) 231-7905, abratani@ndsuext.nodak.edu
Editor: Tom Jirik, (701) 231-9629, tjirik@ndsuext.nodak.edu