Production and sale of cattle Akabane virus antibody test kit launched

Chisso Corporation (Head office: Chuo-ku, Tokyo, President: Shunichi Okada) has developed an "Akabane ELISA kit" to easily detect virus antibodies which causes cattle Akabane disease. This development work has been carried out in collaboration with the Kyushu Research Station (Kagoshima City, Station Director: Tadao Imada) of the National Institute of Animal Health of the National Agriculture and Bio-oriented Research Organization, an independent administrative agency institution. The kit has recently acquired approval for manufacture and distribution from the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries of Japan, and Chisso will start production and marketing of the kit from March, this year.

The Akabane virus-induced disease is an infectious disease which causes the abnormal delivery and congenital abnormalities of cattle, and repeats epidemical spreads of a five to ten year cycle. The damage of rampant infection which broke out in years 1972 to 1975 is estimated to be 5 billion yen or more. For prevention of the disease, every prefectural Livestock Hygiene Service Center currently vaccinates cattle living in areas which have experienced the outbreak of Akabane disease in the past.

Until now, the spread of the virus was investigated by periodically collecting blood specimens from cattle and determining the presence of the antibodies by a method called a neutralization test. However, this method has such problems of requiring not only special facilities for virus control but also experience and time for virus determination.

Chisso's "Akabane ELISA kit" detects the antibodies by the Enzyme-Linked ImmunoSorbent Assay method, which is widely used in clinical laboratory tests. This product solves the problem of the conventional methods while keeping an excellent agreement rate with them and has such characteristics as high sensitivity and specificity. Since this product makes swift and simple diagnosis possible, control of Akabane disease at home and abroad and research and understanding of the disease will be greatly facilitated.

Chisso has been contributing to the safety of food and development of the livestock industry by making a series of products available, such as a "Swine cholera ELISA kit", a group of "Kit-o'-Safe" kits for inspecting food poisoning and environment-polluting substances and "Sanita-kun" for detecting microbes. In the future, Chisso will also be committed to the development of inspection and diagnosis systems and kits by applying such advanced materials as stimulable nano-magnetic particles and light-emitting protein.