Department of Veterinary Microbiology, CCS Haryana Agricultural University, Hisar-125 004, India.
Abstracts of the papers presented at the XVIII National Conference of Indian Virological Society at Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research, Chandigarh, India, December 11–13, 2008.
Newcastle disease is one of the highly contagious, zoonotic infections of poultry birds which causes colossal economic losses to the poultry industry. The occurrence of disease in a poultry flock is usually prevented by vaccination of the young chickens. In order to investigate the role of cell mediated immune response in the virus infection, two groups of birds were infected with two different strains of Newcastle disease virus and monitored at weekly intervals for four weeks for the changes in the proportions of CD4+ and CD8+ T lymphocytes by FACS analysis after staining with T surface marker specific mono clonal antibodies. It was observed that CD4+ T lymphocytes were decreased in proportion during the first week after infection where as a decrease proportions of CD8+ T lymphocyte were observable during the first two week of infection with the virus. A statistically significant increase in CD4+/CD8+ T cell ratio was observed on day 14 post infection in NDV infected birds as compared to that of the control birds.
