Antiviral efficacy of garlic oil against newcastle disease virus

Abstract EN

Newcastle disease is a highly contagious and devastating viral disease of poultry that distributed worldwide causing large economic losses in the poultry industry.

Although vaccines are being used to control the disease, there is no effective antiviral drug used for the treatment of infections.

The aim of this study is to test garlic oil for its antiviral activity against Newcastle disease virus.

Garlic oil was incubated with the virus (LaSota strain) for 1 hr and 24 hrs and its antiviral effect was determined by performing hemagglutination and RT-PCR tests to detect viral surface proteins and viral genome, respectively.

In addition, the toxicity of garlic oil was determined on the living organism by injecting it into chicken embryos with or without the virus.

The results showed that this product played a role in the reduction of virus effectiveness through the destroying of viral surface receptors as well as the reduction of gene amplification as compared with the control group that included the treatment of the virus with a saline solution (phosphate buffer saline), which gave opposite results.

In addition, there was no antiviral toxicity on the living organism since the injected embryos with the oil alone or the oil with virus were healthy and closely resemble those that have not been injected with anything.

In comparison, the embryos that were injected with the virus only showed clear pathological signs that did not appear in the other groups containing the oil.

These results suggest that garlic oil would be a good potential antiviral and probably will have a role to eliminate the disease.