The Sentinel animal program is designed to detect infections not evident in a given colony in a cost-effective manner that does not require testing the entire colony. Immunocompetent young adult sentinel animals are used to indirectly sample the populations of experimental rodents. Sprague-Dawley rats are obtained from Charles River Laboratories for use as sentinels. The Sentinel program consists of one sentinel animal per rack. The sentinel rodents are exposed to soiled bedding collected from all cages on the rack.
Infection is a prevalent and highly contagious disease of mice.
MHV is common in wild mice, which can make it difficult to eliminate the virus from research populations. These include subclinical and clinical infection, as well as wasting syndrome in athymic mice. The ways in which MHV can interfere with studies are too numerous to list. MHV alters the host immune response and is a contaminant of cell lines. It is a common highly contagious disease with high morbidity and low mortality.