A recent view about encephalomyocarditis virus circulating in compartmentalised animal population in Northern Italy.

Encephalomyocarditis virus (Picornaviridae, Cardiovirus A) is the causative agent of the homonymous disease, which may induce myocarditis, encephalitis and reproductive disorders in various mammals, especially in swine. Despite the disease occurred endemically in pig farms since 1997, the recent increase of death experimented in Northern Italy prompted to furtherly investigate the evolution of the virus and the actual spread of the infection. Italian EMC viruses, collected between 2013 and 2019, showed an overall antigenic stability. The in-house ELISA Monoclonal Antibodies based, able to reveal changes in seven different antigenic sites, showed only sporadic and occasional mutations in considered samples and the subsequent phylogenetic analysis confirmed antigenic panel's remarks. All the isolates could be classified within a unique lineage, which comprise other European strains and confirm that the viruses currently circulating in Italy developed from a unique common ancestor. Despite the demonstrated stability of virus, some putative newly emerged variants were detected through antigenic profile analysis and phylogenesis. Finally, the serosurvey proved that spread of EMCV is greater than the diffusion of fatal infections would suggest, due to subclinical circulation of EMCV. It demonstrated an increase in the proportion of seropositive farms, if compared with previous data with no remarkable differences between farms with and without clinical evidence of disease.

Characterization of the O/ME-SA/Ind-2001d foot-and-mouth disease virus epidemic recorded in the Maghreb during 2014-2015.

The O/ME-SA/Ind-2001d has been the main foot-and-mouth disease virus (FMDV) lineage responsible for FMD epidemics outside the Indian subcontinent from 2013 to 2017. In 2014, outbreaks caused by this FMDV lineage were reported in Maghreb, where it was initially detected in Algeria and Tunisia and later in Morocco. This was the first incursion of an FMDV type O of exotic origin in the Maghreb region after 14 years of absence. In this study, we report analyses of both VP1 and whole-genome sequences (WGSs) generated from 22 isolates collected in Algeria and Tunisia between 2014 and 2015. All the WGSs analysed showed a minimum pairwise identity of 98.9% at the nucleotide level and 99% at the amino acid level (FMDV coding region). All Tunisian sequences shared a single putative common ancestor closely related to FMDV strains circulating in Libya during 2013. Whereas sequences from Algeria suggest the country experienced two virus introductions. The first introduction is represented by strains circulating in 2014 which are closely related to those from Tunisia, the second one, of which the origin is more uncertain, includes strains collected in Algeria in 2015 that gave origin to the 2015 outbreak reported in Morocco. Overall, our results demonstrated that a unique introduction of O/Ind-2001d FMDV occurred in Maghreb through Tunisia presumably in 2014, and from then the virus spread into Algeria and later into Morocco.