Vaginal viral shedding and clinical scores in goats vaccinated with inactivated CpHV-1 and challenged vaginally with virulent CpHV-1.

<p>Vaccines were given on day 0 and day 10. All goats were challenged vaginally two weeks following the second vaccination as described in <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0034913#s2" target="_blank">Materials and Methods</a> with 4 ml of virulent CpHV-1 suspension (10⁵ TCID₅₀/50 µl). Naïve goats were included as unvaccinated controls. Goats were monitored daily for 14 days post-challenge and vaginal swabs were collected daily and employed to quantitate the viral shedding. Titration of the infectious virus in vaginal swabs was achieved by measuring the cytopathic effect of serial dilutions of the sample in MDBK cultures (A) while the number of CpHV-1 genomes in vaginal swabs was measured by real-time PCR (B). Clinical scores were also recorded daily following the challenge (C). Data (arithmetic mean ± SD) are cumulative from 4 independent experiments performed as described in <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0034913#s2" target="_blank">Materials and Methods</a> with a total of 8 goats in the naïve group, a total of 8 goats in the inactivated CpHV-1 only vaccinated group and a total of 12 goats in the inactivated CpHV-1 plus MF59™ vaccinated group. In (A), (B) and (C) the double asterisk (**) denotes probability, p, <0.001 that the CpHV-1 shedding titers (A) or the number of CpHV-1 genomes (B) or the clinical scores (C) in goats vaccinated with inactivated CpHV-1 plus MF59™ were equivalent to those of naïve goats. The same probability, p, <0.001 was observed when the CpHV-1 shedding titers (A) or the number of CpHV-1 genomes (B) or the clinical scores (C) in goats vaccinated with inactivated CpHV-1 plus MF59™ were compared to those of goats vaccinated with inactivated CpHV-1 only. In (C) the single asterisk denotes probability, p, <0.05 that the clinical scores in goats vaccinated with inactivated CpHV-1 only were equivalent to those of naïve goats. Data depicted in (A), (B) and (C), were used to calculate the AUC in order to perform statistical analyses. Statistical differences were calculated by the one-way ANOVA test followed by the Tukey's post-hoc test.