Foot and mouth disease (FMD) is a serious disease affecting cattle, sheep and pigs, and could devastate Australia’s $80 billion livestock industry if it entered the country.

This is because the disease is highly infectious, and the only way to stop the spread is to cull or slaughter millions of animals.

However, Professor Pall Thordarson and his colleagues at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) say they have developed an mRNA vaccine that is less risky and would be useful to quickly stop an outbreak.

Traditional vaccines are made with weakened strains of the virus, which can sometimes lead to outbreaks of the very disease they are trying to prevent if control measures aren’t used.

However, an mRNA vaccine is man-made, eliminating this risk and also allowing it to better target the virus.

“The mRNA code for a fragment of a protein on the surface of the virus sends instructions to the animal’s immune system, which will then recognise and stop the virus when it gets challenged by it,” Thordarson said.

Referencing a trial in Germany, he said healthy and vaccinated cattle were not infected with FMD.

“The team was able to show that the mRNA vaccine seems to work for them,” he said.

Thordarson said the vaccine now needs to be mass-produced in larger numbers, warning of the consequences facing Australia if this isn’t made possible.

“Our main role is to scale up the vaccine and accelerate its journey from the lab to a local mass scale production,” he said.

“Because with an outbreak, you need 100,000 or even a million doses, not just a few dozen.

“But it’s not just about stopping disease. This is also about protecting livelihoods and keeping our own supermarket shelves stocked.”

Australia is currently protected from FMD due to strict biosecurity laws and Thordarson said this is a reason why the livestock industry remains so valuable.

Indonesia and the United Kingdom have infamously had outbreaks of the disease that crippled their livestock industries.

“The main reason why we have these markets is that other countries don’t want to buy beef from countries that have disease, because they are trying to keep their own herds immune,” Thordarson said.

“It took them [The UK] a while to stop it. And they had to stop it, essentially, by slaughtering millions of cows.”