Advice to the media
Monday, December 21, 2020
The finding reveals the potential for spread to humans.
What
According to scientists at the National Institutes of Health, reston ebolavirus (RESTV) should be considered a livestock pathogen that can affect other mammals, including humans. The precaution comes from a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in which scientists found that experimental piglets infected with RESTV developed severe respiratory disease and removed the virus from the upper respiratory tract. RESTV can infect humans, but is not known to cause disease. Scientists are now expressing concern that pigs could serve as a “temporary host or amplifier of ebolaviruses.”
“The emergence of RESTV in pigs is a wake-up call, as transmission to humans through direct contact with pigs or the food chain is possible,” they state in their study report. Scientists from the 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 caught attention in 2008 when an outbreak swept pigs in the Philippines. This outbreak led to the first association of RESTV transmission in pigs to humans, prompting the World Health Organization to issue a global alert in February 2009. Sequences of RESTV in pigs have also been identified in the United States. China, and scientists suggest that officials control swine disease. throughout the Philippines and Southeast Asia.
NIAID scientists conducted their study to answer two key questions: could they cause disease in young pigs – mimicking a natural infection with RESTV isolated from the 2008 swine outbreak – and, if so, would these pigs shed virus through of your airways? Their work confirmed that, in fact, pigs developed severe pneumonia with viruses that were released from 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. His work included Yorkshire crossbred pigs, which are often used in commercial pig production systems. No RESTV was found in commercial pigs in the United States.
Continued studies in this project will examine whether coinfection with other swine viruses affects the ability of RESTV to cause serious disease in pigs and whether pigs play a broad role in the reception of ebolaviruses.
Article
And Haddock et al. Reston virus causes serious respiratory diseases in young domestic pigs. PNAS DOI: 10.1073 / pnas.2015657118 (2020).
WHO
Heinz Feldmann, MD, Ph.D., head of the NIAID Virology Laboratory, and Elaine Haddock, Ph.D., Laboratory of Virology, are available for comment.
NIAID conducts and supports research, at NIH, throughout the United States and around the world, to study the causes of infectious and mediated diseases by immunity and to develop better means to prevent, diagnose and treat these diseases. Press releases, fact sheets and other NIAID-related materials are available on the NIAID website.
Regarding the National Institutes of Health (NIH):
NIH, the country’s medical research agency, includes 27 institutes and centers and is a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. NIH is the leading federal agency that conducts and supports basic, clinical, and translational medical research, and investigates the causes, treatments, and cures for common and rare diseases. For more information about NIH and its programs, visit www.nih.gov.
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