Ministry of Agriculture

About: Ministry of Agriculture is a government organization based out in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Chemistry & Salmonella. The organization has 1153 authors who have published 1189 publications receiving 14442 citations.

Neutralising antibodies for West Nile virus in horses from Brazilian Pantanal

Abstract: In 1937, an unknown neurotropic virus called West Nile virus (WNV) was isolated from the blood of a low-grade febrile woman from northeastern Uganda (Smith -burn et al. 1940). Afterwards, WNV was detected in Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Europe and was as -sociated mainly with sporadic or size-limited outbreaks of WNV fever, which was usually a self-limited and un -complicated febrile syndrome (Couissinier-Paris 2006). However, in the mid-1990s, a major WNV fever epidem -ic in Europe with a high rate of neurological infections occurred in the lower Danube valley and Bucharest ar-eas in Romania (Tsai et al. 1998). Concomitantly, human and animal outbreaks of WNV fever with neurological disorders were reported in the old world, which warned of the change of WNV fever impact on animal and pub -lic health (Tber Abdelhaq 1996, Platonov et al. 2001). In 1999, WNV definitively reemerged as a worldwide major public health and veterinarian concern when it was de -tected in the Western Hemisphere for the first time as the cause of human and equine encephalitis outbreaks con -comitant with extensive mortality in birds in the north -eastern United States of America (USA) (CDC 1999). The virus rapidly spread through North America and towards Latin America (Komar & Clark 2006). There have been recent reports of serological evidence of WNV activity in Colombia (Mattar et al. 2005), Venezuela (Bosch et al. 2007) and especially Argentina, where anti-WNV anti -bodies have been detected in birds (Diaz et al. 2008) and the virus was isolated for the first time in South America from the brains of horses that had died of encephalitis (Morales et al. 2006). However, most South American countries, including the largest, Brazil, remain without reports of WNV infection. Alerted by the periodical out -breaks of WNV encephalitis in the USA (Lindsey et al. 2010) and the serological evidence of WNV activity in South America, we performed this study.The Brazilian Pantanal was selected as a suitable place for the study of WNV circulation because of the following factors: (i) natural foci of WNV infections have been mostly described in wetland ecosystems, such deltas and flood plains, as reported in France (Joubert et al. 1970), Venezuela (Bosch et al. 2007), Romania (Tsai et al. 1998) and Italy (Autorino et al. 2002), (ii) the local movement of migratory birds (Nunes & Tomas 2008), (iii) the unsuccessful efforts of the detection of WNV-specific antibodies in the free-ranging birds in Brazil-ian coastal areas (MS 2003, 2004), (iv) the recent detec-