The results from several experiments demonstrated that an effective vaccine for contagious caprine pleuropneumonia could be made with inactivated F38 mycoplasma. Evaluation of the amounts of lyophilised F38 mycoplasma plus saponin showed that the optimum formulation was 0.15 mg of mycoplasma in saponin. Saponin inactivates the mycoplasma and provides the adjuvant effect necessary to stimulate a protective immune response. The lyophilised F38 mycoplasma could be stored for 14 months at either 4 degrees C or 22 degrees C without losing its immunising potential. A single immunisation with the optimum formulation produced a protective immune response in goats that lasted for longer than one year.

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Latex beads were sensitised with a polysaccharide isolated from a F38 culture supernatant and used in a slide agglutination test to detect serum antibodies in goats with contagious caprine pleuropneumonia. The latex agglutination test detected antibodies in the sera of goats by 22 +/- 2 (mean +/- 1 sd) days after contact exposure to contagious caprine pleuropneumonia, whereas the complement-fixation test detected antibodies by 24 +/- 4 days after contact exposure. Both tests were negative with 181 sera from a farm which was free of the disease. When the same tests were done on 763 sera from two different farms with outbreaks of classical contagious caprine pleuropneumonia, 63 per cent were positive by the latex agglutination test and 23 per cent were positive by the complement-fixation test. Besides being more sensitive than complement fixation, the latex agglutination test can be performed in the field using undiluted serum or whole blood and a result obtained within two minutes.

Monoclonal antibody WM-25 inhibited the in vitro growth of 13 F38 isolates from goats with contagious caprine pleuropneumonia but not 7 heterologous mycoplasma isolates representing four different species. In contrast to results with polyclonal antisera, growth inhibition by monoclonal antibody WM-25 was specific for F38 mycoplasma isolates and constituted a reliable means of distinguishing F38 from other mycoplasmas.

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