Vaccines Are Pushing Pathogens to Evolve

Quanta Magazine

Clipped from section on Chicken Vaccines

“Read and his colleagues are studying how the herpesvirus that causes Marek’s disease — a highly contagious, paralyzing and ultimately deadly ailment that costs the chicken industry more than $2 billion a year — might be evolving in response to its vaccine. Its latest vaccine, that is. Marek’s disease has been sickening chickens globally for over a century; birds catch it by inhaling dust laden with viral particles shed in other birds’ feathers. The first vaccine was introduced in 1970 , when the disease was killing entire flocks. It worked well, but within a decade, the vaccine mysteriously began to fail; outbreaks of Marek’s began erupting in flocks of inoculated chickens. A second vaccine was licensed in 1983 in the hopes of solving the problem, yet it, too, gradually stopped working. Today, the poultry industry is on its third vaccine . It still works, but Read and others are concerned it might one day fail, too — and no fourth-line vaccine is waiting. Worse, in recent decades, the virus has become more deadly.”

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