Swine Health Blackbelt #14 - Dr. Gaurav Rawal: Is your PRRS positive test from a live vaccine or from a wild type?

Modified live virus vaccines are one of the best ways to prevent and control PRRSV today, but PRRS cases continue to be a problem. When testing for PRRSV though, its hard to tell if a positive test is from the live vaccine or from the wild type. In this episode Dr. Guarav Rawal talks about his MLV vaccine specific PCR assay that can detect the presence of a vaccine virus in a sample and what that can mean for the swine industry.

Meet the guest: 

Dr. Gaurav Rawal is a Virology Lab Manager in the Department of Veterinary Diagnostic and Production Animal Medicine at Iowa State University (ISU). He received his DVM from Nepal in 2014 & MS from ISU in Veterinary Preventive Medicine with Drs Bailey Arruda & Daniel Linhares in 2019. His MS thesis was on understanding epidemiology, infection dynamics & cellular tropism of an emerging virus in the US swine industry i.e. porcine astrovirus type 3. 

He is currently working with Dr. Jianqiang Zhang on his Ph.D. with a focus on applied virology and PRRS vaccine immunology.