Pyrosequencing of cDNA from brains of parrots with proventricular dilatation disease (PDD), an unexplained fatal inflammatory central, autonomic, and peripheral nervous system disease, showed 2 strains of a novel Borna virus. Real-time PCR confirmed virus presence in brain, proventriculus, and adrenal gland of 3 birds with PDD but not in 4 unaffected birds.

The fulfillment of Koch’s postulates shows that the virus causes proventricular dilatation disease in parrots.

Israel acute paralysis virus (IAPV) is associated with colony collapse disorder of honey bees. Nonetheless, its role in the pathogenesis of the disorder and its geographic distribution are unclear. Here, we report phylogenetic analysis of IAPV obtained from bees in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Israel and the establishment of diagnostic real-time PCR assays for IAPV detection. Our data indicate the existence of at least three distinct IAPV lineages, two of them circulating in the United States. Analysis of representatives from each proposed lineage suggested the possibility of recombination events and revealed differences in coding sequences that may have implications for virulence.Over the winter of 2006 and 2007, an estimated 23% of all beekeeping operations in the United States experienced losses of hives attributed to colony collapse disorder (CCD) (30). More than 90 cultivated crops depend on the honey bee, Apis mellifera, for pollination; thus, CCD has profound implications for the food supply (23). We recently reported that the presence in hives of the dicistrovirus Israel acute paralysis virus (IAPV) was strongly correlated with the presence of CCD (8).IAPV was first described in 2004 in Israel (21), where infected bees presented with shivering wings, progressed to paralysis, and then died outside the hive. IAPV has features comparable to those of members of the family Dicistroviridae of the superfamily Picornaviridae. Unlike members of the Picornaviridae, which have a single open reading frame (ORF) encoding a single polyprotein, viruses in the family Dicistroviridae have two ORFs encoding two polyproteins. Dicistroviruses have two internal ribosomal entry sites (IRES), one found in the 5Ј untranslated region (UTR) and the other located in the intergenic region between ORF1 and ORF2. Other viruses known to infect honey bees, and related to picornaviruses, are sacbrood virus, deformed wing virus, acute bee paralysis virus (ABPV), Kashmir bee virus (KBV), and black queen cell virus (4, 7).Given the importance of honey bees as pollinators and the reported association between CCD and IAPV, we pursued phylogenetic analysis of geographically discrete IAPV isolates. We report the complete genome sequences of representatives from each of three lineages of IAPV and demonstrate through detailed analysis of four regions of the viral genome (the 5Ј UTR and 5Ј terminus of ORF1; the 3Ј terminus of ORF1, the intergenic region, and the 5Ј terminus of ORF2; ORF2; and the RNA-dependent RNA polymerase [RdRp]) the presence on three continents of at least three clusters of IAPV, two of them currently circulating in the United States. MATERIALS AND METHODSSample collection and RNA extraction. Adult bees were collected from migratory beekeeping operations in the United States with CCD. Diseased apiaries were identified based on evidence of recent collapse of colonies within the apiary and a lack of dead bees in the collapsed colonies. From each colony, 150 adult bees were collected and stored at Ϫ80°C until they w...

Proventricular dilatation disease (PDD) is a fatal infectious disease of birds that primarily affects psittacine birds. Although a causative agent has not been formally demonstrated, the leading candidate is a novel avian bornavirus (ABV) detected in post-mortem tissue samples of psittacids with PDD from the USA, Israel and, recently, Germany. Here we describe the presence of ABV in a parrot with PDD as well as in clinically normal birds exposed to birds with PDD. In two ABV-positive post-mortem cases, the tissue distribution of ABV was investigated by quantitative real-time reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction. Viraemia was observed in a PDD-affected bird whereas a restriction of ABV to nerve tissue was found in the non- PDD-affected bird. Healthy birds from the same aviary as the affected birds were also found to harbour the virus; 19/59 (32.2%) birds tested positive for ABV RNA in cloacal swabs, providing the first evidence of ABV in clinically healthy birds. In contrast, 39 birds from the same geographic area, but from two different aviaries without PDD cases in recent years, had negative cloacal swabs. ABV RNA-positive, clinically healthy birds demonstrated the same serological response as the animal with confirmed PDD. These results indicate that ABV infection may occur without clinical evidence of PDD and suggest that cloacal swabs can enable the non-invasive detection of ABV infection.

In 1983, reports of antibodies in subjects with major depressive disorder to an as-yet uncharacterized infectious agent associated with meningoencephalitis in horses and sheep led to the molecular cloning of the genome of a novel, negative-stranded neurotropic virus, Borna disease virus (BDV).1,2 This advance enabled the development of new diagnostic assays including in situ hybridization, PCR and serology based on recombinant proteins. Since these assays were first implemented in 1990 more than 80 studies have reported an association between BDV and a wide range of human illnesses that include major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, anxiety disorder, chronic fatigue syndrome, multiple sclerosis, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, dementia and glioblastoma multiforme.3,4 However, to date there has been no blinded case-control study of the epidemiology of BDV infection. Here, in a United States-based, multi-center, yoked case-control study with standardized methods for clinical assessment and blinded serologic and molecular analysis, we report the absence of association of psychiatric illness with antibodies to BDV or with BDV nucleic acids in serially-collected serum and white blood cell samples from 396 subjects, a study population comprised of 198 matched pairs of patients and healthy controls (52 schizophrenia/control pairs, 66 bipolar disorder/control pairs, and 80 major depressive disorder/control pairs). Our results argue strongly against a role for BDV in the pathogenesis of these psychiatric disorders.