Progress and opportunities in the development of vaccines against mites, fleas and myiasis-causing flies of veterinary importance

Despite the potential benefits offered by vaccination against ectoparasites, there have been few commercial successes with this strategy, in spite of sustained efforts using increasingly sophisticated techniques. This review outlines the progress and challenges offered by recent research into vaccination against some of the major ectoparasites of veterinary importance, and provides an insight into the opportunities arising from our increased understanding of the immunology of host-parasite relationships and the potential for exploitation of this knowledge and that arising from new genomic data provided by expressed sequence tag projects.