Assessment of listing and categorisation of animal diseases within the framework of the Animal Health Law (Regulation (EU) No 2016/429)::equine encephalomyelitis (Eastern and Western)

Abstract Equine encephalomyelitis (Eastern and Western) has been assessed according to the criteria of the Animal Health Law (AHL), in particular criteria of Article 7 on disease profile and impacts, Article 5 on the eligibility of equine encephalomyelitis (Eastern and Western) to be listed, Article 9 for the categorisation of equine encephalomyelitis (Eastern and Western) according to disease prevention and control rules as in Annex IV, and Article 8 on the list of animal species related to equine encephalomyelitis (Eastern and Western). The assessment has been performed following a methodology composed of information collection and compilation, expert judgement on each criterion at individual and, if no consensus was reached before, also at collective level. The output is composed of the categorical answer, and for the questions where no consensus was reached, the different supporting views are reported. Details on the methodology used for this assessment are explained in a separate opinion. According to the assessment performed, equine encephalomyelitis (Eastern and Western) can be considered eligible to be listed for Union intervention as laid down in Article 5(3) of the AHL. The disease would comply with the criteria as in Section 5 of Annex IV of the AHL, for the application of the disease prevention and control rules referred to in point (e) of Article 9(1). The assessment here performed on compliance with the criteria as in Section 4 of Annex IV referred to in point (d) of Article 9(1) is inconclusive. The animal species to be listed for equine encephalomyelitis (Eastern and Western) according to Article 8(3) criteria are several species of mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians as susceptible species; rodents, lagomorphs and several bird species as reservoirs and at least four mosquito species (family Culicidae) as vectors

Lice, Life, and Leafhoppers: How Weigl’s vaccine creation influenced my virology research

This paper is dedicated to the memory of my brother Alfred who worked as a physician in the ghetto of Kolomyya. On September 1, 1942 my father was shipped with 8 000 Jews to be gassed in Belzec. Two weeks later my brother was arrested and his dead body returned to the ghetto a few hours later. On October 14 my mother was shipped to the Belzec extermination camp with the remaining 7 000 ghetto inhabitants.My wife and I survived the holocaust in refugee camps in Romania, but 138 closest relatives in Nazi occupied Europe perished in Treblinka, Belzec, and Auschwitz. In 1928, when I was 13 years old, my brother Alfred, who was a medical student in Lviv , told me that his biology professor, Rudolf Weigl, developed during World War I the first vaccine against exanthematic typhus. Weigl, who was a young officer in the Austrian army, got the brilliant idea how to prepare a vaccine to protect people from the deadly disease that killed thousands of soldiers and civilians. Weigl infected healthy body lice individually, giving them enemas containing typhus rickettsiae. The inoculated lice were maintained for 5 days in batches of 140, in cages carried on the bodies ofWeigl’s assistants, because they only fed on human blood. After 5 days the typhus-carrying lice were dissected and from 140 intestines, crushed in a glass micro mortar with a few drops of phenol solution, a single dose of the protective vaccine was produced. I listened fascinated to my brother’s description of Weigl’s procedure and I decided to study medicine, become a researcher, and do similar experiments when I grow up. Twenty years after hearing about Weigl I got the opportunity to follow his steps, not with human lice but with leafhoppers and plant pathogens. Daily contacts with scientists at Cold Spring Harbor, who years later became Wolf Price and Nobel Prize winners greatly influenced me and helped in my own scientific career

Insect Physiology by Vincent B. Wigglesworth

Volume: 83Start Page: 128End Page: 12

Mechanical Transmission of a Plant Tumor Virus to an Insect Vector

Most plant viruses transmitted by leafhoppers have not been demonstrated to be infective in extracts. The virus dealt with in this paper causes tumors in certain susceptible plants, is carried by leafhoppers, and like others in that group has proven difficult to detect in extracts. It is our purpose to recount briefly the variety of methods that failed to transmit the virus and to report on the success of insect-to-insect transmission by injection