Vaccination as a means of control of foot-and-mouth disease in sub-saharan Africa.

The presence of foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) in a country is a major obstacle to the development of agriculture because of its adverse effects on livestock production and agricultural exports. The eradication of FMD in sub-saharan Africa by the implementation of slaughtering-out is impractical for various reasons, but vaccination with good quality FMD vaccines can help prevent losses in stock production and reduce the overall incidence of the disease. Oil based FMD vaccines have been used with success in South American countries and have logistic and immunological advantages which would make them useful in sub-saharan African countries. The wide intratypic variation of SAT strains prevalent in sub-saharan Africa and their endemicity in African buffalo, presents a challenge to vaccine producers and requires constant epidemiological surveillance to ensure the relevance of vaccines to field conditions.