 Pigs are infected by the same influenza viruses, which infect humans H1N1 and H3N2. Swine influenza is mild disease in pigs, however it is the main cause for respiratory disease because combined with other common pathogens on the farm it can lead to really severe respiratory disease, pneumonia and complications. So there are serious animal welfare issues and in addition there are severe economic losses for the farmers because there is loss in gain of weight, reproduction losses. Another problem with swine influenza viruses is that they also can jump from pigs to humans although it's actually much more often humans to infect the pigs. When swine influenza virus adapts to transmitting the humans it can cause pandemic and version of that occurred in 2009 H1N1 pandemic. Swine influenza spreads like human influenza by contact, by droplets, sneezing in the air. It can be transmitted by humans or wild animals or birds. At present good biosecurity measures by not allowing infected animals on the farm or using good disinfection and monitoring all that could help. The best prevention is of course vaccination and there are two ways of cross-protection. One is to induce antibodies which recognize the conserved parts of these glycoproteins which are on the surface of the virus and these antibodies are they prevent the virus to enter the cells. And the second type of immune response is T cells which recognize the conserved parts of the internal parts of the gene and this T cell immunity not always prevents the entrance of the virus into the cells but it makes disease much less severe and also prevents transmission. As both pigs and humans are infected by the same subtypes of viruses the pigs are an excellent model to study not only swine influenza but also influenza infection in humans and the pigs have are physiologically, anatomically, immunologically very similar to humans they have exactly the same structure of the lung they have the same receptors which bind the influenza viruses so research done in large animals like pigs is extremely informative. You immunize the animals with the new vaccine you wait after that you infect the animals with influenza and you measure the virus in their nose in their lungs and also at post mortem you look at the pathology in the lung. If you want to see whether a vaccine is protective you have to test it in animals and the swine model is a fantastic model because swine influenza the the pig is a natural health pathogen model because swine influenza is a real disease but also because of the similarity between swine and humans it is an excellent model to test therapeutic agents and vaccines for humans. Universal vaccine that can protect against any strain of viruses is highly desirable and that is the ultimate goal and we have recently tested a candidate universal vaccine this vaccine is called ASFU and it is developed by Alan Townsend from the University of Oxford and that is a weakened version of the influenza virus the vaccine does not have the surface glycoprotein hemagutinin which is important for the entrance of the virus in the cell so once ASFU is in the cell it can replicate but it cannot spread however it can produce all of the other proteins of the virus and very strong key cell immune responses made against conserved parts of these internal proteins which reduces the replication of the virus and can protect against more severe disease and also prevents transmission and we have shown that when we gave this vaccine to pigs there was a much reduced virus in the nose and in the lungs in the pigs and also we have shown that for this protection is very important to induce immune response in the lungs which is the site of entry of the pathogen and also we have shown that the best way to induce that is by giving the vaccine by our soul