Media advice
Monday December 21, 2020
Finding a potential for spread to humans reveals.
What
Reston Ebola virus (RESTV) should be considered a livestock pathogen with the potential to affect other mammals, including humans, according to scientists at the National Institutes of Health. The warning comes from a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in which the scientists found that experimental piglets infected with RESTV developed a serious respiratory disease and secreted the virus from the upper respiratory tract. RESTV can infect humans, but it is not known to cause disease. Now the scientists are expressing concern that pigs could serve as an “intermediate or enhancer host for Ebola viruses.”
“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 a possibility,” they state in their study report. Scientists at 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 shipped from the Philippines to Reston, Virginia. The virus also gained attention in 2008 when a swine outbreak spread in the Philippines. That outbreak sparked the first association of RESTV transmission from pig to human, prompting the World Health Organization to issue a global alert in February 2009. RESTV sequences have also been identified in pigs in China, and the scientists suggest officials are monitoring pigs for disease in the Philippines and Southeast Asia.
The NIAID scientists conducted their research to answer two important questions: Can they cause disease in young pigs – mimic a natural infection with RESTV isolated from the 2008 pig outbreak – and if so, would those pigs release virus through their respiratory tract? Their work confirmed that the pigs did, in fact, develop severe pneumonia with virus excretion from the upper respiratory tract. They also found that the age of the piglets at the time of infection – they used animals between three and seven weeks old – did not change the disease course. Their work involved Yorkshire crossbred pigs, which are often used in commercial pig production systems. RESTV has not been found in commercial pigs in the United States.
Continuing studies in this project will investigate whether co-infection with other swine viruses affects the ability of RESTV to cause serious disease in pigs and whether pigs play a broad role in hosting Ebola viruses.
Article
E Haddock et al. The Reston virus causes serious respiratory diseases in young domestic pigs. PNAS DOI: 10.1073 / pnas.2015657118 (2020).
Who
Heinz Feldmann, MD, Ph.D., Chief of NIAID’s Laboratory of Virology, and Elaine Haddock, Ph.D., Laboratory of Virology, are available for comment.
NIAID conducts and supports research – at NIH, in the United States and worldwide – to study the causes of infectious and immune-mediated diseases and to develop better tools to prevent, diagnose and treat these diseases. News releases, fact sheets and other NIAID-related material 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 part of the United States Department of Health and Human Services. NIH is the premier federal agency that conducts and supports basic, clinical and translational medical research, investigating the causes, treatments, and cures for both common and rare diseases. For more information about NIH and its programs, visit www.nih.gov.
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