Clinical and Diagnostic Studies of Contagious Ecthyma (ORF) In Sheep

Epidemiology, clinical features, and molecular detection of orf virus in Haryana (India) and its adjoining areas

“…The leukocytosis along with neutrophilia and lymphocytosis as observed in the current study has also been reported previously (Weiss and Wardrop 2010 ; Kazemi Asl et al 2018 ). The reason for leukocytosis as well neutrophilia might be related to animals’ response to inflammatory lesions of orf initially and to probable secondary bacterial infection later (Al Saad et al 2017 ). Additionally, the deviation from normal values observed in hematological parameters of orf-affected animals could be related to weight loss, sub-nutrition, oxidative stress, pathological changes, and co-morbid conditions observed in two of the outbreaks (PPR in two and Haemonchosis in another outbreak) (Hayat et al 1996 ).…”

Immunomodulatory Strategies for Parapoxvirus: Current Status and Future Approaches for the Development of Vaccines against Orf Virus Infection

“…ORFV infection may result in up to 100 percent morbidity in lambs, mortality can be up to 50 percent in animals with secondary infections [35] and immunocompromised conditions [36]. The virus is well known for its resistance to harsh environmental conditions [37] and its ability to cause persistent reinfections in sheep [38] and goats which has contributed to the further spread of infections in other animals such as deer, guinea pigs, and dogs [28,[30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39]. The virus can be inadvertently transmitted to a susceptible animal through injured skin, readily replicates, and causes proliferative lesions that give rise to scab [19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26]28,29,40].…”

“…Likewise, the virus incurred huge financial losses in the small ruminants industry by reducing both the quality [39,41] and quantity of milk [3,42,43], and even the death of infected animals [6,44,45]. In addition, ORFV infection has serious socio-cultural and economic challenges for livestock farmers, most of whom rely on small ruminants as their main source of livelihood [17,27,[33][34][35][36][37]. Thus, ORFV infections increase the demand for the huge cost of management; resulting in reduced average income [27,40,[46][47][48][49].…”

“…However, the acute infection caused by ORFV, which usually affects the lips, nose, teats, and sometimes on mucosal parts, has been described as a self-limiting disease, [32,[50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57], and as such it has no positive impact on management although in several instances, particularly in lambs, it can turn to be persistent and even death [32,48]. The severe infection, which usually affects the eyelids, feet, vulva, and in some cases the udder has reportedly led to outbreaks in young animals [37] and kids resulted in tremendous losses in dairy farming across the world [20,47,49,50].…”

“…Furthermore, several strategies have been explored to develop effective antiviral drugs and prophylactic vaccines to control ORFV infection in sheep and goats, most of which are derived from immunogenic envelope proteins. Treatment of infected animals with antiviral drugs can only reduce the severity of the disease but cannot eliminate the virus [37,51]. Although, treating an infected animal with antibiotics can only minimize secondary bacterial infections such as staphylococcal dermatitis associated with ORFV infection [20,[58][59][60][61][62][63][64][65].…”