A group of German scientists has developed a vaccine that has shown favorable results in protecting camels against Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, or MERS.
The vaccine reduced the amount of the virus found in dromedary camels, which they synthetically infected with the disease, according to Live Science.
Dromedaries and other camels are the common hosts of the MERS-CoV, a virus that affects the respiratory tracts of animals and of humans, once contracted.
The virus starts as a mild infection that causes severe mucus production of the animal, which then becomes a carrier of the virus, making it easier for the infection to reach humans via aerogenous dissemination.
Once humans contract the virus, the symptoms could be as simple as the common cold, yet it has a mortality rate of 35 percent.
The scientists used eight dromedaries, four vaccinated and four unvaccinated, to test the protective efficacy of MVA-S, a modified vaccine based on the orthopoxvirus virus Vaccinia Virus Ankara, which expresses the MERS-CoV spike (S) protein - regarded as a key to neutralize coronaviruses, Eureka Alert reported.
Results showed that the camels injected with the vaccine developed very mild symptoms and did not exhibit sever mucus secretion, while those that were not vaccinated produced large quantities of the virus and suffered severe runny nose.
Hence, even though the vaccine did not prevent infection, it did reduce the amount of virus that the vaccinated camels produced, according to BBC News.
The researchers published their findings in the journal Science.
