Search

Hepatitis E virus (HEV) is the etiological agent behind hepatitis E infection. Domestic pigs and wild boars are the main animal reservoirs of HEV. Very few papers describe HEV infection in goats and sheep. As the data pertaining to the presence of HEV virus in the milk of small ruminants in Europe are lacking, the aim of this paper was to examine a representative number of milk samples from these animals. The detection of HEV genome (HEV RNA) was performed using reverse transcriptase real-time polymerase chain reaction (RT-qPCR). HEV RNA was found in 2.8% of the examined samples. Positivity ranged from 101 to 103 genome equivalents/mL (GE/mL) with a median of 9.99 × 102 GE/mL. On the basis of these results, the milk of small ruminants could represent a source of HEV infection to consumers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An increasing number of indigenous cases of hepatitis E caused by genotype 3 viruses (HEV-3) have been diagnosed all around the word, particularly in industrialized countries. Hepatitis E is a zoonotic disease and accumulating evidence indicates that domestic pigs and wild boars are the main reservoirs of HEV-3. A detailed analysis of HEV-3 subtypes could help to determine the interplay of human activity, the role of animals as reservoirs and cross species transmission. Although complete genome sequences are most appropriate for HEV subtype determination, in most cases only partial genomic sequences are available. We therefore carried out a subtype classification analysis, which uses regions from all three open reading frames of the genome. Using this approach, more than 1000 published HEV-3 isolates were subtyped. Newly recovered HEV partial sequences from hunted German wild boars were also included in this study. These sequences were assigned to genotype 3 and clustered within subtype 3a, 3i and, unexpectedly, one of them within the subtype 3b, a first non-human report of this subtype in Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]