Centre for Animal Disease Research and Diagnosis, Indian Veterinary Research Institute Izatnagar-243122.
Abstracts of Research Papers Presented during the National Symposium of Indian Virological Society at Unit of Plant Virology, Division of Plant Pathology, Indian Agricultural Research Institute, New Delhi-110 012, October 14–1.
Bluetongue is an infectious and non-contagious arthropod (Culicoides sp.) borne viral disease of domestic and wild ruminants. This is primarily a disease of sheep but occasionally cattle and goats are affected with subclinical infections. There are lot of outbreaks reported throughout the year in India causing enormous economic losses. The economic losses are mainly attributed to high mortality and morbidity including abortions, milk, meat and fleeces loss. As there is no vaccine available in India, vaccination is not generally carried out to immunize the susceptible animals against the disease in India. The sero-surveillance of bluetongue antibodies in the susceptible animals would provide important information about the exposure of the animals to the bluetongue virus and the level of antibodies present necessary for the epidemiological study. To know the level of antibodies in 88 serum samles of sheep of different villages of U.P. to bluetongue virus, monoclonal antibody based competitive ELISA was carried out and 36 (40.9%) were found to be positive and 52 (59.1%) negative. The result has been expressed as per cent inhibition and values above 50% were taken as positive and below 50% taken as negative.
