Vaccines are Pushing Pathogens to Evolve: Andrew Read became a scientist so he could spend more time in nature, but he never imagined that would mean a commercial chicken farm.
Read, a disease ecologist who directs the Pennsylvania State University Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics, and his research assistant Chris Cairns meandered their way through a hot, humid, pungent-smelling barn teeming with 30,000 young broiler chickens deep in the Pennsylvania countryside.
Covered head to toe in white coveralls, the two men periodically stopped and crouched, collecting dust from the ground with gloved hands.
Birds squawked and scuttered away. The men transferred the dust into small plastic tubes, which they capped and placed in plastic bags to bring back to the laboratory.
"Funny where science leads you," Read said.
Read and his colleagues are studying how the herpes-virus that causes Marek's disease - a highly contagious, paralyzing and ultimately deadly ailment that costs the chicken industry more than $2 billion a year - might be evolving in response to its vaccine. Its latest vaccine, that is...
Marek's disease has been sickening chickens globally for over a century; birds catch it by inhaling dust laden
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