Search Results (43)

Rift Valley Fever Virus (RVFV) is an arbovirus that predominantly affects sheep, goats, and cattle, causing epizootics in livestock and epidemics in humans. Infection in pregnant livestock leads to high abortion rates and neonatal mortality. In humans, RVFV usually causes a self-limiting febrile illness, but severe forms can develop, such as hepatitis, hemorrhage, encephalitis, and death. In addition, the association between RVFV infection during pregnancy and miscarriages or stillbirths has been documented. RVFV is transmitted by a range of mosquito species, and, due to the diffusion of these insects, the virus has spread in several world regions, making possible the risk of a public health emergency. Nevertheless, research remains limited and cellular pathology is still poorly characterized. This work aimed to fill some knowledge gaps on the comprehension of RVFV pathogenesis. For this purpose, transmission electron microscopy (TEM) was used to analyze cellular modifications associated with RVFV morphogenesis in four human cell lines (HuH-7, LAN-5, A549, and HTR-8/SVneo) derived from liver, brain, lung, and placenta. Our results showed that all four cell lines are permissive to RVFV infection and highlighted differences in the cytopathogenesis associated with the cell type. These findings could have important implications in understanding disease mechanisms and developing antiviral strategies. Full article

The seasonal patterns of viral diseases in farm animals present significant challenges to global livestock productivity, with cold stress emerging as a potential modulator of host–pathogen interactions. This review synthesizes current knowledge on the expression dynamics of heat shock protein 70 (HSP70) in farm animals under cold-stress conditions and its potential roles as (1) a viral replication facilitator and (2) an immune response regulator. This review highlights cold-induced HSP70 overexpression in essential organs, as well as its effects on significant virus life cycles, such as porcine epidemic diarrhea virus (PEDV), porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus (PRRSV), and bovine viral diarrhea virus (BVDV), through processes like viral protein chaperoning, replication complex stabilization, and host defense modulation. By integrating insights from thermophysiology, virology, and immunology, we suggest that HSP70 serves as a crucial link between environmental stress and viral disease seasonality. We also discuss translational opportunities targeting HSP70 pathways to break the cycle of seasonal outbreaks, while addressing key knowledge gaps requiring further investigation. This article provides a framework for understanding climate-driven disease patterns and developing seasonally adjusted intervention strategies. Full article

In recent years, there has been rapid development in Chinese small and medium-sized livestock farms, accompanied by an increase in operational risks within the supply chain. To ensure the stability and sustainability of supply chain operations in small and medium-sized livestock farms, it is essential to thoroughly analyze their potential hazards and formulate effective prevention strategies. This paper employs the relevant supply chain theories, combined with previous research and expert interviews, to conduct an empirical analysis of supply chain operation risks in small and medium-sized livestock farms, with a specific focus on pig farms, beef cattle farms, laying hen farms, and broiler farms. The research indicates that the supply chain operation risks faced by small and medium-sized livestock farms primarily stem from external environmental factors and production-related challenges. Furthermore, external environmental risks predominantly arise from market fluctuations and compliance with environmental regulations, while production risk mainly pertains to disease safety. Based on the research findings, this paper proposes specific measures for risk prevention, including the strengthening of external environmental security, driving production innovation capacity, strengthening market forecasting capacity, constantly enhancing environmental awareness, and strengthening epidemic prevention efforts. Full article

Since the emergence of serotype BTV-3, another bluetongue virus, in fall 2023, this variant has been causing great losses in livestock farming in Europe. The virus spreads faster than the epidemic BTV-8, which appeared on the continent nine years earlier. This study describes the first case of BTV-3 in Poland detected in a European bison (Bison bonasus) in Poland’s Wolin National Park, approximately 15 km from the German–Polish border. The animal suffered from a severe and fatal hemorrhagic disease. The symptoms included respiratory problems, bloody diarrhea, and rapidly progressive cachexia. In addition to the virus’s confirmation as BTV-3 and the presence of the infecting agent in the blood and spleen of the animal, the virus was also detected in one pool of blood-fed Culicoides punctatus caught near the bison enclosure two weeks after the death of the bison. This is the first detection of BTV-3 in C. punctatus, which suggests vector competency for this serotype. Phylogenetic analysis based on segment 2 of the virus revealed the homology of the Polish isolate to the BTV-3 strains circulating in the Netherlands, Germany, and Portugal, and slightly lower similarity to the BTV-3 strains detected in sheep in Sardinia (Italy) in 2018 and in Tunisia in November 2016. A retrospective serosurvey of the exposure to BTV in thirteen other European bison populations distributed over the country indicated that the observed case at the Wolin National Park was the first BTV-3 to be detected in Poland. Full article

Rift Valley fever virus (RVFV) is a mosquito-borne zoonotic disease within the genus Phlebovirus. Symptoms of the disease in animals range from moderate to severe febrile illness, which significantly impacts the livestock industry and causes severe health complications in humans. Similar to bunyaviruses in the genus Orthobunyavirus transmitted by mosquitoes, RVFV progression is dependent on the susceptibility of the physical, cellular, microbial, and immune response barriers of the vectors. These barriers, shaped by the genetic makeup of the mosquito species and the surrounding environmental temperature, exert strong selective pressure on the virus, affecting its replication, evolution, and spread. The changing climate coupled with the aforementioned bottlenecks are significant drivers of RVF epidemics and expansion into previously nonendemic areas. Despite the link between microclimatic changes and RVF outbreaks, there is still a dearth of knowledge on how these temperature effects impact RVF transmission and vector competence and virus persistence during interepidemic years. This intricate interdependence between the virus, larval habitat temperatures, and vector competence necessitates increased efforts in addressing RVFV disease burden. This review highlights recent advancements made in response to shifting demographics, weather patterns, and conveyance of RVFV. Additionally, ongoing studies related to temperature-sensitive variations in RVFV–vector interactions and knowledge gaps are discussed. Full article

Coronavirus epidemics have posed a serious threat to both human and animal health. To combat emerging infectious diseases caused by coronaviruses, various animal infection models have been developed and applied in research, including non-human primate models, ferret models, hamster models, mouse models, and others. Moreover, new approaches have been utilized to develop animal models that are more susceptible to infection. These approaches include using viral delivery methods to induce the expression of viral receptors in mouse tissues and employing gene-editing techniques to create genetically modified mice. This has led to the successful establishment of infection models for multiple coronaviruses, significantly advancing related research. In contrast, livestock and pets that can be infected by animal coronaviruses provide valuable insights when used as infection models, enabling the collection of accurate clinical data through the analysis of post-infection pathological features. However, despite the potential insights, there is a paucity of research data pertaining to these infection models. In this review, we provide a detailed overview of recent progress in the development of animal models for coronaviruses that cause diseases in both humans and animals and suggest ways in which animal models can be adapted to further enhance their value in research. Full article

Although the highlands of East Africa lack the geo-ecological landmarks of Rift Valley fever (RVF) disease hotspots to participate in cyclic RVF epidemics, they have recently reported growing numbers of small RVF clusters. Here, we investigated whether RVF cycling occurred among livestock and humans in the central highlands of Kenya during inter-epidemic periods. A 2-year prospective hospital-based study among febrile patients (March 2022–February 2024) in Murang’a County of Kenya was followed by a cross-sectional human–animal survey. A total of 1468 febrile patients were enrolled at two clinics and sera tested for RVF virus RNA and antiviral antibodies. In the cross-sectional study, humans (n = 282) and livestock (n = 706) from randomly selected households were tested and questionnaire data were used to investigate sociodemographic and environmental risk factors by multivariate logistic regression. No human (n = 1750) or livestock (n = 706) sera tested positive for RVFV RNA. However, 4.4% livestock and 2.0% humans tested positive for anti-RVFV IgG, including 0.27% febrile patients who showed four-fold IgG increase and 2.4% young livestock (<12 months old), indicating recent virus exposure. Among humans, the odds of RVF exposure increased significantly (p < 0.05, 95% CI) in males (aOR: 4.77, 2.08–12.4), those consuming raw milk (aOR: 5.24, 1.13–17.9), milkers (aOR: 2.69, 1.23–6.36), and participants residing near quarries (aOR: 2.4, 1.08–5.72). In livestock, sheep and goats were less likely to be seropositive (aOR: 0.27, 0.12–0.60) than cattle. The increase in RVF disease activities in the highlands represents a widening geographic dispersal of the virus, and a greater risk of more widespread RVF epidemics in the future. Full article

The global livestock industry is facing a serious threat from a widespread foot-and-mouth disease virus (FMDV) epidemic. The timely detection of FMDV can significantly mitigate its harmful effects. This study aimed to establish and evaluate a TaqMan fluorescence quantitative PCR assay to assess its sensitivity, specificity, reproducibility, and stability. The standard curve equation range is 6.43 × 10⁹–6.43 × 10¹ copies/µL, with an R² value of 0.996 and a standard curve equation of y = −3.586x + 36.245. The method successfully detected 64.3 copies/µL of the target gene for FMDV and exhibited high specificity for FMDV. Repeatability tests demonstrated low coefficients of variation within and between groups (<2%), indicating good reproducibility. The clinical samples analyzed using this method showed results consistent with those of the SYBR Green I RT-qPCR assay, confirming the reliability of the method. Overall, the developed test method displayed high sensitivity, specificity, reproducibility, and stability, making it suitable for the rapid diagnosis of foot-and-mouth disease in clinical settings. Full article

One of the most pressing issues in livestock farming is the protection of economically valuable livestock. The prevention and the treatment of infectious diseases are directly related to maintaining stable livestock output. Vermin is a primary source of livestock infection, resulting in the occurrence and expansion of epidemic diseases. To protect livestock against infections caused by epidemic diseases, this study proposes a vermin repulsion system called the Miyazaki Vermin Repulsion Robot (MiVeReR). Different from existing vermin repulsion systems, the development objective of MiVeReR is to repel vermin rather than kill them. In particular, MiVeReR generates changeable acousto-optic signals as repulsion signals for wild animals. Furthermore, MiVeReR employs image data to monitor the invasion of wild animals and their location data to track them, and accurately focuses the generated signals on them. These acousto-optic stimuli can be changed based on the reactions of the intruder through the feedback of the image data to ensure the effectiveness of the repulsion motions for vermin. Details on the hardware configuration of MiVeReR and its control scheme are explained. As a first step to develop MiVeReR, we attempted to repel vermin such as mice and wild cats from farm environments. Extensive experiments were conducted to verify the effectiveness of MiVeReR and the proposed control solution. Through experiments in wild environments, the feasibility of MiVeReR was inspected. The results of this study are concretely described. Full article

One of the major factors hindering efficient livestock production is the presence of high-impact infectious animal diseases, such as foot and mouth disease (FMD), lumpy skin disease (LSD), and bovine ephemeral fever (BEF), which are notable viral infections affecting cattle in Egypt, leading to significant economic losses. FMD is caused by the foot and mouth disease virus (FMDV) of the genus Aphthovirus in the Picornaviridae family. LSD is caused by lumpy skin disease virus (LSDV) of Capripox genus within the Poxviridae family, subfamily Chordopoxvirinae. BEF is caused by bovine ephemeral fever virus (BEFV) of genus Ephemerovirus in the Rhabdoviridae family. FMD is a highly contagious viral infection of domestic and wild cloven-hooved animals and can spread through the wind. On the other hand, LSD and BEF are arthropod-borne viral diseases that mainly affect domestic cattle and water buffalo. Despite government vaccination efforts, these three viral diseases have become widespread in Egypt, with several reported epidemics. Egypt’s importation of large numbers of animals from different countries, combined with unregulated animal movements through trading and borders between African countries and Egypt, facilitates the introduction of new FMDV serotypes and lineages not covered by the current vaccination plans. To establish an effective control program, countries need to assess the real epizootic situation of various infectious animal diseases to develop an efficient early warning system. This review provides information about FMD, LSD, and BEF, including their economic impacts, causative viruses, global burden, the situation in Egypt, and the challenges in controlling these diseases. Full article

Viral infections in animals continue to pose a significant challenge, affecting livestock health, welfare, and food safety, and, in the case of zoonotic viruses, threatening global public health. The control of viral diseases currently relies on conventional approaches such as inactivated or attenuated vaccines produced via platforms with inherent limitations. Self-assembling ferritin nanocages represent a novel vaccine platform that has been utilized for several viruses, some of which are currently undergoing human clinical trials. Experimental evidence also supports the potential of this platform for developing commercial vaccines for veterinary viruses. In addition to improved stability and immunogenicity, ferritin-based vaccines are safe and DIVA-compatible, and can be rapidly deployed in response to emerging epidemics or pandemics. This review discusses the structural and functional properties of ferritin proteins, followed by an overview of the design and production of ferritin-based vaccines, the mechanisms of immune responses, and their applications in developing vaccines against animal and zoonotic viruses. Full article

Extracting entities from large volumes of chicken epidemic texts is crucial for knowledge sharing, integration, and application. However, named entity recognition (NER) encounters significant challenges in this domain, particularly due to the prevalence of nested entities and domain-specific named entities, coupled with a scarcity of labeled data. To address these challenges, we compiled a corpus from 50 books on chicken diseases, covering 28 different disease types. Utilizing this corpus, we constructed the CDNER dataset and developed a nested NER model, MFGFF-BiLSTM-EGP. This model integrates the multiple fine-grained feature fusion (MFGFF) module with a BiLSTM neural network and employs an efficient global pointer (EGP) to predict the entity location encoding. In the MFGFF module, we designed three encoders: the character encoder, word encoder, and sentence encoder. This design effectively captured fine-grained features and improved the recognition accuracy of nested entities. Experimental results showed that the model performed robustly, with F1 scores of 91.98%, 73.32%, and 82.54% on the CDNER, CMeEE V2, and CLUENER datasets, respectively, outperforming other commonly used NER models. Specifically, on the CDNER dataset, the model achieved an F1 score of 79.68% for nested entity recognition. This research not only advances the development of a knowledge graph and intelligent question-answering system for chicken diseases, but also provides a viable solution for extracting disease information that can be applied to other livestock species. Full article

Brucellosis, as an infectious disease that affects both humans and livestock, poses a serious threat to human health and has a severe impact on economic development. Essentially, brucellosis transmission is a kind of study in biological systems, and the epistemic uncertainty existing in the data of confirmed brucellosis cases in China is realized as significant uncertainty that needs to be addressed. Therefore, this paper proposes an uncertain time series model to explore the confirmed brucellosis cases in China. Then, some methods based on uncertain statistics and symmetry of the biological system are applied, including order estimation, parameter estimation, residual analysis, uncertain hypothesis test, and forecast. The proposed model is practically applied to the data of confirmed brucellosis cases in China from January 2017 to December 2020, and the results show that the uncertain model fits the observed data better than the probabilistic model due to the frequency instability inherent in the data of confirmed brucellosis cases. Based on the proposed model and statistical method, this paper develops an approach to rapidly forecast the number of confirmed brucellosis cases in small sample scenarios, which can contribute to epidemic control in real application. Full article

Rift Valley fever virus (RVFV) causes disease outbreaks in livestock and humans; however, its inter-epidemic circulation is poorly understood, similar to other arboviruses affecting cattle such as bluetongue virus (BTV) and epizootic hemorrhagic disease virus (EHDV). Serum samples were collected in Baringo County, Kenya from 400 cattle, accompanied by a risk factor questionnaire. Serological tests were then conducted to determine the exposure of cattle to RVFV, BTV, and EHDV. RVFV, BTV, and EHDV IgG seroprevalence rates were 15.5%, 91.5%, and 91%, respectively. Seropositivity for RVFV, BTV, and EHDV was significantly higher in adult cattle, as well as in females for RVFV. Cattle with herd owners aged between 30–39 years were less likely to be seropositive for RVFV compared to those with owners over the age of 60 years. High seroprevalence of BTV and EHDV in cattle indicates significant exposure and the subclinical circulation of these viruses, presenting a risk of outbreaks to sheep and naïve cattle. Moreover, the detection of RVFV-seropositive young cattle born after the last reported outbreak suggests inter-epidemic circulation of the virus. Overall, monitoring these arboviruses in cattle is crucial in understanding their distribution and seroprevalence during inter-epidemic periods. Full article

Antimicrobial resistance represents an alarming public health problem; its importance is related to the significant clinical implications (increased morbidity, mortality, disease duration, development of comorbidities, and epidemics), as well as its economic effects on the healthcare sector. In fact, therapeutic options are severely limited by the advent and spread of germs resistant to many antibiotics. The situation worldwide is worrying, especially in light of the prevalence of Gram-negative bacteria—Klebsiella pneumoniae and Acinetobacter baumannii—which are frequently isolated in hospital environments and, more specifically, in intensive care units. The problem is compounded by the ineffective treatment of infections by patients who often self-prescribe therapy. Resistant bacteria also show resistance to the latest generation antibiotics, such as carbapenems. In fact, superbacteria, grouped under the acronym extended-spectrum betalactamase (ESBL), are becoming common. Antibiotic resistance is also found in the livestock sector, with serious repercussions on animal production. In general, this phenomenon affects all members of the biosphere and can only be addressed by adopting a holistic “One Health” approach. In this literature overview, a stock is taken of what has been learned about antibiotic resistance, and suggestions are proposed to stem its advance. Full article