Session III Ensuring the safe transfer of virus-positive diagnostic material is an important concern for FMD field studies. It has been proposed that the complex and expensive shipping requirements for infectious material should not apply to acid-treated FMDV-positive lateral flow devices (LFDs). The treatment with citric acid demonstrably abolishes virus infectivity, but it has been shown that acid-treated LFDs still contain full-length FMDV RNA that allows the subsequent recovery of infectious virus by chemical transfection of cell cultures. Whether full-length FMDV RNA alone can cause a productive infection in the natural host, however, has not been explored.