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Monday, December 21, 2020
The finding reveals the potential for spreading to humans.
What the
Reston ebolavirus (RESTV) should be considered an animal pathogen with the potential to affect other mammals, including humans, according to scientists at the National Institutes of Health. The attention comes from a study published in The works of the National Academy of Sciences in which scientists found that experimental piglets infected with RESTV developed severe respiratory diseases and eliminated the virus from the upper respiratory tract. RESTV can infect people, but it is not known to cause disease. Now, scientists are concerned that pigs could serve as an “intermediate host or amplifier for ebolaviruses.”
“The appearance of RESTV in pigs is a wake-up call, because transmission to humans through direct contact with pigs or the food chain is a possibility,” they said in their study report. Scientists at NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) conducted the work at Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton, Montana.
Scientists first identified RESTV in 1989 in research monkeys sent from the Philippines to Reston, Virginia. The virus also gained attention in 2008, when an outbreak swept through pigs in the Philippines. This outbreak led to the first human RESTV transmission association in humans, prompting the World Health Organization to launch a global alert in February 2009. RESTV sequences have also been identified in Chinese pigs, and scientists suggest that officials monitor pigs for disease. in the Philippines and Southeast Asia.
NIAID scientists conducted their study to answer two key questions: could it cause disease in young pigs – mimicking the natural RESTV infection isolated from the 2008 swine outbreak – and if so, those pigs would shed the virus through the airways ? Their work confirmed that, in fact, pigs developed severe pneumonia, with the virus coming out of the upper respiratory tract. They also determined that the age of the piglets at the time of infection – they used animals between three and seven weeks – did not change the course of the disease. Their work involved Yorkshire pigs, which are frequently used in commercial pig production systems. RESTV was not found in commercial pigs in the United States.
Continued studies in this project will examine whether co-infection with other swine viruses affects the ability of RESTV to cause severe disease in pigs and whether pigs play a large role in hosting ebolaviruses.
Article
And Haddock et al. Reston virus causes severe respiratory illness in young domestic pigs. PNAS DOI: 10.1073 / pnas.2015657118 (2020).
Which
Heinz Feldmann, MD, Ph.D., head of the NIAID Virology Laboratory, and Elaine Haddock, Ph.D., Virology Laboratory, are available for comment.
NIAID conducts and supports research – at the NIH, across the United States and around the world – to study the causes of infectious and immune-mediated diseases and to develop better means of preventing, diagnosing and treating these diseases. Press releases, fact sheets and other materials related to NIAID are available on the NIAID website.
About the National Institutes of Health (NIH):
NIH, the national medical research agency, includes 27 institutes and centers and is a component of the US Department of Health and Human Services. NIH is the first federal agency to conduct and support basic, clinical, and translational medical research and investigate the causes, treatments, and cures of both common and rare diseases. For more information about NIH and its programs, visit www.nih.gov.
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