ULiège and the epidemics

The University of Liège has a long tradition of commitment to the fight against epidemics and pandemics, both through its scientific research and its public health activities.

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ince the beginning of the ^20th century, the University of Liège (ULiège) has consistently distinguished itself in the fight against epizootics, epidemics and pandemics. This is due to a combination of factors. Firstly, research in the field of infectiology was developed very early on, and simultaneously in different faculties (Faculties of Veterinary Medicine, Medicine, Sciences andAgronomy), within ULiège. Expertise in this field has been steadily growing, thanks to the scientific heritage handed down from generation to generation by leading researchers. Secondly, disciplines complementary to infectiology, without which it is no longer possible to envisage an effective fight against epidemics, have grown exponentially at ULiège over the last few decades. We're talking here about immunology, public health sciences, biochemistry and molecular biology. Thirdly, ULiège is the only Belgian university, along with UGent, to have a Faculty of Veterinary Medicine. This is of the utmost importance, given that epizootics are more frequent than human epidemics, and that veterinarians have developed highly specialized expertise in this field over the years. Fourthly, since 1991, ULiège's Faculties of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine have been located in close proximity to each other, within the Sart Tilman, which has enabled the establishment of unprecedented collaborations between human and veterinary physicians in the field of immuno-infectiology. These collaborations demonstrated their virtuous potential during the COVID-19 pandemic. Indeed, most of the technological solutions developed in Belgium during this pandemic were developed within the faculties of veterinary medicine and medicine at ULiège.

It would take too long to list exhaustively the role played by ULiège in the fight against epizootics, epidemics and pandemics since the beginning of the ^20th century. We have therefore chosen to report five representative examples below.

In 1920, rinderpest, which had disappeared from Europe, reappeared in Belgium. A herd of zebu cattle from India reintroduced the disease, which rapidly spread throughout the country. In just five months, Belgian veterinarians, including members of the Cureghem Veterinary School (now the ULiège Faculty of Veterinary Medicine), eradicated the epizootic through strict prophylactic measures. This earned them the title of Doctor of Veterinary Medicine. This episode highlighted the need for international collaboration in the fight against epizootics, leading in 1924 to the creation of the Office International des Epizooties (OIE), since renamed OMSA (World Organization for Animal Health), whose first president was Belgian veterinary surgeon Henri De Roo, a graduate of the Cureghem Veterinary School.

Rabies was still rife in Belgium at the end of the 20^th century. At that time, Professor Paul-Pierre Pastoret, of the ULiège Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, developed a protocol for orally vaccinating fox populations (baits) with a recombinant vaccine. These vaccination campaigns eliminated vulpine rabies in Belgium as early as 2001. Since then, Belgium is considered to have eradicated rabies.

Belgium has experienced cases of "mad cow" disease (bovine spongiform encephalopathy; BSE), which peaked in 2000 (nine cases reported). This had economic repercussions in the agricultural world, but also represented a danger to human health, as the disease is transmissible to humans (anthropozoonosis). An epidemio-surveillance network was therefore set up, and screening tests were entrusted by the federal government to the Laboratoire de Microbiologie des Denrées Alimentaires of the ULiège Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, which was initially the only Belgian laboratory capable of carrying out these tests. A little later (2002), the Centre de Recherche sur les Protéines Prion, the CRPP, dedicated to research into spongiform encephalopathies, was created and financed by the Walloon Region in response to the BSE crisis. The Center is located on the site of the ULiège University Hospital (CHU).

ULiège's Faculty of Veterinary Medicine has been combating epizootics and zoonoses for many years. A particularly interesting case is that of African swine fever. It appeared in Belgium in 2018 and represented a major crisis.

ULiège played a key role in:

1. the rapid identification of outbreaks through field analysis and laboratory testing,
2. coordinating efforts with regional and national authorities to eradicate the disease in infected wild boar, while protecting livestock farms
3. research into the viability of the virus in different environments, providing crucial data for adapting management protocols. These actions enabled Belgium to be declared free of African swine fever in 2020, illustrating the effectiveness of the strategies implemented.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, ULiège developed the diagnostic procedure used in Belgium by the "national COVID-19 testing platform", which carried out over 5 million tests using this procedure. The ULiège COVID-19 laboratory has carried out the largest number of tests in Belgium. At the same time, ULiège researchers secured the supply of reagents and plastic consumables needed for these tests, by creating ad hoc local production and packaging lines (viral inactivation and viral nucleic acid extraction reagents, 96-well plates and tubes for nasopharyngeal swabs). This has enabled the Belgian government to free itself from the need to source materials from multinationals and, by May 2020, to become the European country with the largest testing capacity. ULiège has also developed a salivary self-sampling kit designed for mass screening of the active population for the virus. This type of screening has been used in nursing homes in the Walloon region to curb the spread of the virus, and consequently mortality, even before access to vaccination.

ULiège has also :

1. contributed, through fundamental and applied research, to a better understanding of the virus (publications in Nature, New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of Experimental Medicine etc.),
2. ensured the dissemination of reliable information on COVID-19 through webinars, awareness campaigns and collaboration with the media, playing a crucial role in countering misinformation,
3. developed a plasmapherapy procedure, in partnership with the Red Cross and the University Hospital of Liège, with the aim of transferring functional anti-Sars-CoV-2 antibodies to the patients most affected by the disease, and
4. produces the proteins needed to develop antigenic tests.