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India's first indigenous vaccine against African Swine Fever, developed by the Indian Council of Agricultural Research, was released on 4 August 2026.
It was dedicated to the nation by Union Agriculture and Farmers Welfare Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan.
The vaccine is a live attenuated product built on the MA-104 cell line, developed by ICAR-NIHSAD from an Indian field isolate of the ASF virus with specific gene deletions.
Using the widely available MA-104 line rather than a patented proprietary cell line removes dependence on restricted manufacturing platforms and can lower production costs.
It is administered to healthy pigs above eight weeks of age as a 1 ml intramuscular injection, with a booster after 14 days.
African Swine Fever has resisted vaccination for decades for reasons that go to the structure of the virus. It is a large, complex DNA virus with many genes devoted to evading the host immune system, and infection does not reliably produce the kind of neutralising antibody response that conventional inactivated vaccines rely on. Killed-virus preparations simply do not protect. That leaves live attenuated vaccines — a weakened but living virus that replicates enough to provoke real immunity without causing disease. Attenuation here is achieved by deleting specific genes, in this case from an Indian field isolate of the Genotype II strain, which matters because a vaccine works best against the strain actually circulating in the region. Two risks follow from using a live virus, and both appear in the testing list: genetic stability, meaning the deleted genes must not be restored, and virulence reversion, meaning the weakened strain must not regain the ability to cause disease. The other constraint is manufacturing. Live vaccines must be grown in cell culture, and most ASF vaccine candidates rely on proprietary cell lines whose owners control access. Building this one on MA-104, a widely available line, is what turns a laboratory result into something that can be manufactured at scale domestically.
Simple Analogy: An inactivated vaccine shows the immune system a photograph of the intruder; a live attenuated one lets in a disarmed version so the body learns to recognise the real thing. With ASF, the photograph has never been enough.
The apex body for agricultural research and education in India, functioning under the Department of Agricultural Research and Education in the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare.
Pig rearing is central to household income in much of the North East, which is why ASF outbreaks there have an economic reach far beyond the value of the animals lost.
ASF is not transmissible to humans but spreads readily through contaminated feed, vehicles and pork products, making border and transport controls as important as vaccination.
The use of a non-proprietary cell line removes dependence on patented foreign manufacturing platforms, the same self-reliance argument applied earlier to human vaccine production.
GS Paper 3 > Science and Technology: Biotechnology; Animal Husbandry and Food Security
General Awareness > Science > Diseases and Vaccines
General Awareness > General Science > Biology
General Awareness > Current Affairs > Science and Agriculture
Which one of the following statements is not correct?
Answer: Hepatitis B, unlike Hepatitis C, does not have a vaccine.
A highly contagious and usually fatal viral disease of pigs, caused by a large DNA virus; it does not infect humans and has no treatment.
A vaccine using a weakened but living pathogen that replicates enough to produce immunity without causing disease.
Weakening a virus by removing specific genes responsible for virulence, the method used to create this vaccine strain.
The risk that an attenuated live vaccine strain regains the ability to cause disease — a key safety parameter tested for this vaccine.
A widely available cell culture line used to grow the vaccine virus, chosen in place of patented proprietary lines to enable large-scale, low-cost production.
The ICAR institute specialising in high security animal diseases, which developed the attenuated ASF virus strain used in this vaccine.