Pathogenicity of infectious laryngotracheitis virus as measured by chicken embryo inoculation

A comparison was made between pathogenicities for chicken embryos of unattenuated and attenuated strains or isolates of infectious laryngotracheitis (ILT) virus. All 11-day-old chicken embryos inoculated with 10(3.0) or 10(4.0) TCID50 of unattenuated strain NS175 via allantoic cavity died within 6 days. On the contrary, no chicken embryos of the same age died when inoculated with the same amount of cell-culture-attenuated isolate C7 in a like manner. The mortality index for chicken embryos (MICE) was obtained by dividing the cumulative number of embryos dying within 7 days by the cumulative number of embryos surviving 7 days. The reliability of the MICE test was confirmed by duplicate and triplicate experiments with strain NS175 and isolate C7. MICE obtained in the experiments with 9 different strains or isolates of ILT virus ranged from 0 to 1, and the values were well correlated with the pathogenicities for chickens. The results from the present work suggest that strains or isolates with MICE less than 0.16 would have low or no pathogenicity for chickens, and those with MICE more than 0.27 would be highly pathogenic. Further studies are needed using additional isolates of ILT virus with varied pathogenicities.