8. PREVENTION AND CONTROL STRATEGIES
African Swine Fever is devastating to the swine industry and currently, there is no commercially available vaccine to control the disease (Gaudreault and Richt, 2019).The development of vaccines against ASFV has been almost entirely neglected, mainly due to the technical difficulties involved in its development, gaps in knowledge concerning ASFV virulence factors (Rock, 2017) and to the fact that ASF was considered an ‘exotic’ disease in developed countries. However, the situation has dramatically changed with the recent emergence of the virus to Europe and Asia, threatening the global swine industry. Efforts to develop ASF vaccines are ongoing with different vaccine strategies. Among them, gene-deleted vaccines have shown promising results in eliciting effective immune responses (Chen et al., 2020; Borca et al., 2020; Reis et al., 2017; O’Donnell et al., 2017; Monteagudo et al., 2017; O’Donnell et al., 2015a; O’Donnell et al., 2015b). In absence of effective vaccines, the need of implementing alternate measures of prevention is important and critical to control the disease: