A novel strain of lumpy skin disease virus causes clinical disease in cattle in Hong Kong

Abstract

Lumpy skin disease virus (LSDV) is an emerging poxviral pathogen of cattle that is currently spreading throughout Asia. The disease situation is of high importance for farmers and policy makers in Asia. In October 2020, feral cattle in Hong Kong developed multi‐focal cutaneous nodules consistent with lumpy skin disease (LSD). Gross and histological pathology further supported the diagnosis and samples were sent to the OIE Reference Laboratory at The Pirbright Institute for confirmatory testing. LSDV was detected using quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) and additional molecular analyses. This is the first report of LSD in Hong Kong. Whole genome sequencing (WGS) of the strain LSDV/Hong Kong/2020 and phylogenetic analysis were carried out in order to identify connections to previous outbreaks of LSD, and better understand the drivers of LSDV emergence. Analysis of the 90 core poxvirus genes revealed LSDV/Hong Kong/2020 was a novel strain most closely related to the live‐attenuated Neethling vaccine strains of LSDV and more distantly related to wildtype LSDV isolates from Africa, the Middle East and Europe. Analysis of the more variable regions located towards the termini of the poxvirus genome revealed genes in LSDV/Hong Kong/2020 with different patterns of grouping when compared to previously published wildtype and vaccine strains of LSDV. This work reveals that the LSD outbreak in Hong Kong in 2020 was caused by a different strain of LSDV than the LSD epidemic in the Middle East and Europe in 2015–2018. The use of WGS is highly recommended when investigating LSDV disease outbreaks.

The First Lumpy Skin Disease Outbreak in Thailand (2021): Epidemiological Features and Spatio-Temporal Analysis

“…LSD was first reported in Zambia in 1929 (2, 8) and thereafter spread to Sub-Saharan Africa, Middle Eastern countries, South-Eastern European countries, and Asian countries (9,20). In Asia, the disease was first reported in Bangladesh in 2019 (21), followed by China (10), India (22), Nepal (23), Bhutan (9), Vietnam (24), Hong Kong (25), and Myanmar (9). Due to the potential risk of a rapid spread, the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) has listed LSD as a notifiable disease (26).…”

Complete Coding Sequence of Lumpy Skin Disease Virus Isolated from Kinmen Island, Taiwan, in 2020

“…Lumpy skin disease virus (LSDV) is an emerging pathogen of the family Poxviridae , having spread over the past 10 years from Africa and the Middle East into southeastern Europe, the Caucasus, Russia, and, more recently, Asia ( 1 – 8 ). It will cause an economic impact on the cattle industry in the invaded regions ( 9 – 10 ).…”

A robust, cost-effective and widely applicable whole-genome sequencing protocol for capripoxviruses

“…All three diseases have made several incursions in southern Europe but were successfully controlled by stamping out or mass vaccination. In 2019, LSD reached the Eastern part of Asia being reported in India, Bangladesh and China ( Gupta et al, 2020 ; Lu et al, 2020 ) and in 2020 the disease spread further to South-East Asia ( Flannery et al, 2021 ; Roche et al, 2020 ; Tran et al, 2021 ). The recent spread of LSDV into disease-free areas in the Eurasian continent has brought renewed attention to these neglected diseases.…”

“…With the advent of high-throughput sequencing, the labor-intensive cloning step could be omitted which greatly reduced the cost and time needed to obtain complete genomes. To increase the number of viral reads, the viral DNA is enriched before sequencing by purifying and/or concentrating the virus particles ( Biswas et al, 2020 ; Douglass et al, 2019 ; Flannery et al, 2021 ; van Schalkwyk et al, 2020 ; Wolff et al, 2020 ; Zeng et al, 2014 ). Although these protocols allow to measure genetic variation on a genome-wide scale, they still rely on virus isolation to obtain sufficient viral-enriched DNA.…”