Vomiting and wasting disease associated with hemagglutinating encephalomyelitis viruses infection in piglets in jilin, china

Necropsy was performed on the piglets. Major pathological changes included meningeal hyperemia, meningeal hemorrhage and cortical hemorrhage. Minor changes were also observed in other organs. Histopathological changes included satellitosis and neuronophagia in the cerebral cortex.Mice were infected with the isolated virus. Their histopathological changes were similar to those symptoms observed in the piglets, exhibiting typical changes for non-suppurative encephalitis. Thus, Porcine hemagglutinating encephalomyelitis virus mainly causes damage to the nervous system but also impacts other organs. This viral strain (isolate PHEV-JLsp09) found in the Siping area of Jilin Province in China is evolutionally closest to the HEV-67N stain (North American strain), indicating that this viral strain evolved from the PHEV from North America.Porcine hemagglutinating encephalomyelitis coronavirus (PHEV) is a member of the Coronaviridae family, which causes porcine encephalomyelitis. PHEV predominantly affects 1-3 week-old piglets[1], with clinical piglets vomiting, exhaustion and obvious neurological symptoms as the main feature. The mortality rate is up to 20-100%[2]. Since 1958, when the disease broke out in the Canadian province of Ontario for the first time[3], many countries have reported about it. Serological test results proved that it is common for the pigs to be infected by PHEV[4,5], and the disease may have spread worldwide. In August 2006, the disease broke out in part of the pig farms in Argentina, resulting to 1226 deaths, with the morbidity rate up to 52.6%[1]. In China, an PHEV infection has been reported occurring in a pig farm in Beijing as early as in 1985, followed with reports from Jilin, Liaoning, Shandong, Taiwan, etc. The large-scale epidemics of HEV occurred in Taiwan in 1994 had a fatality rate of almost 100%[6], resulting to serious economic losses. Serological survey conducted by foreign scholars revealed that PHEV infection in pigs is very common, wit