Workers who suffered from diarrhea last year cost Canadian businesses more than $1 billion. Animal researchers think they can do something to reduce that hit to the bottom line.
Lorne Babiuk, director of the Veterinary Infectious Disease Organization, told a Saskatchewan health conference that vaccinating animals against food-borne illnesses is one way animal research can benefit human medicine.
Other examples include surgical procedures that are perfected on animals first, pig organs used in human transplants and developments in the treatment of diabetes that originated through animal research.
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But the subject Babiuk knows best is vaccines.
He told doctors attending the second annual 2020 Health Vision conference in Saskatoon that if it wasn’t for research on cowpox, a vaccine would never have been created for smallpox.
Vaccines are one area where animal and human health issues are converging and it’s a field where overlap could lead to savings.
Statistics show that employees who miss work or are unable to perform their normal duties because of dia-rrhea and symptoms of other food illnesses cost Canadian businesses $1.3 billion last year, Babiuk said.
Food-borne illnesses have become a hot topic in Canada and around the world in recent years. There have been reports of E. coli outbreaks at American hamburger chains and repeated recalls of ground beef by packers.
Closer to home, a strain of E. coli killed seven people and left thousands sick in Walkerton, Ont., last year.
Cryptosporidium in drinking water at North Battleford, Sask., garnered national headlines earlier this year when hundreds of people were hospitalized with diarrhea, cramps and high fever.
Babiuk said VIDO is working on vaccines that could reduce the severity of such outbreaks. The twist is that it’s the animals that will be inoculated, not people.
A vaccine for E. coli 0157:H7 is being tested in feedlot trials in British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Ontario. Once injected into an animal, it reduces the amount of E. coli bacteria shed in the manure.
“We can reduce the shedding by 1,000-10,000 fold – now that’s a lot,” Babiuk said.
The fewer bacteria there are in the manure, the less chance there is of humans contracting E. coli poisoning from contaminated meat and water.
Babiuk said the feedlot trials are going well, but there have been some interesting hurdles to overcome with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, which registers animal vaccines.
“This is really pioneering stuff because they will only license vaccines for diseases that actually cause problems in animals. Well, E. coli doesn’t cause problems in animals so they had to rewrite the rules.”
The vaccine hasn’t been licensed yet, but Babiuk said they have cleared the way for it to obtain CFIA registration on the basis that it reduces bacterial contamination of the environment. If it does receive registration, it would be a world first – an animal vaccine that prevents human infection.
VIDO is also developing similar vaccines to help reduce outbreaks of salmonella, cryptosporidium and campylobacter.
Campylobacter is a food-borne illness that few people are familiar with – but they should be. It is more prevalent than salmonella. Babiuk said more than 95 percent of animals carry the disease, which killed 3,000 people in North America last year.
“I guess people haven’t really talked about it because they couldn’t probably spell it very well.”
When VIDO researchers started working on the vaccines a few years ago, they couldn’t find pharmaceutical companies to work with.
“Nobody wanted to touch it.”
Now that they know it works, “everybody wants to be part of the gravy train.”
