Cornelia Adlhoch and colleagues at the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin have published a paper on the prevalence of hokovirus in wild boar in Virology Journal.

Porcine Hokovirus (PHoV) was recently discovered in Hong Kong, they explain. This new Parvovirus of pigs is closely related to the human Parvoviruses 4 and 5 (PARV4/5) and bovine Hokovirus (BHoV). So far, nothing is known about the presence and prevalence of PHoV in regions of the world other than Hong Kong.

They initiated a study was to investigate PHoV in German wild boars from five different geographical regions, using a newly established quantitative real-time PCR assay. Analysis of collected liver and serum samples revealed high overall prevalence (32.7 per cent; 51/156) of PHoV in wild boars.

The prevalence differed between the regions and increased with age. For animals under one year of age, the prevalence was 22 per cent but this rose to 41 per cent of adult boar. Two near full-length genomes and a large fragment for three additional isolates from different regions were sequenced and used for phylogenetic analysis. The German PHoV sequences from wild boars showed a close relationship with sequences of isolates from Hong Kong.

Reference

Adlhoch C., M. Kaiser, H. Ellerbrok and G.P. Pauli. 2010. High prevalence of porcine hokovirus in German wild boar populations. Virology Journal, 7:171. doi:10.1186/1743-422X-7-171

Further Reading

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You can view the full report (in provisional PDF format) by clicking here.