Outbreak of acute bovine viral diarrhea in Brazilian beef cattle: clinicopathological findings and molecular characterization of a wild-type BVDV strain subtype 1b

When first described in 1946, bovine viral diarrhea (BVD) was characterized as an acute transmissible disease associated with severe leucopenia, high fever, depression, diarrhea, gastrointestinal erosions, and hemorrhages. Recently the severe acute form has been related only to some hypervirulent BVDV-2 strains. This article reports the detection of BVDV-1b associated with an acute and fatal outbreak of BVD in a Brazilian beef cattle herd. Depression, anorexia, watery diarrhea, sialorrhea, and weakness were observed in six steers. One of these animals was evaluated for laboratorial, clinical, and pathological alterations. Laboratory findings were non-specific; clinically, the animal was weak, with dehydration and erosive oral lesions. Pathological alterations were predominant at the tongue, esophagus, and rumen. A RT-PCR assay using primers to partially amplify the 5′ untranslated region (5′UTR) of the BVDV genome was performed and identified BVDV in all clinical samples analyzed. Phylogenetic analysis of BVDV derived from lymph node revealed that this strain was clustered within the BVDV subtype 1b. This differentiating was only possible to be performed by molecular characterization since both clinical presentation and pathologic findings were similar to BVDV-2 infection.     

Associations between Campylobacter fetus, Haemophilus somnus, Leptospira hardjo and bovine viral diarrhea virus antibody titers in dairy cattle from a California herd

In a cross-sectional study, the associations of age, serological status against Campylobacter fetus (CF), Haemophilus somnus (HS) and Leptospira hardjo (LH) with the seroprevalence of bovine viral diarrhea virus (BVDV) in dairy cattle were evaluated. Six hundred and thirty cattle from a herd in Tulare county of California were included in the study. Blood samples from the cattle were collected in December 1986. Enzyme-linked immunosorbant assay (ELISA) was used to determine the positive or negative status of cows against CF, HS, LH and BVDV antigens. Loglinear analysis was used to describe the relationships of four categorical variables with the seroprevalence of BVDV. The final loglinear model was interpreted as a logit model and obtained by conditioning on explanatory variables in the model found to relate significantly with BVDV seropositivity. The hierarchical logit model included two two-way interactions (BVDV × HS and BVDV × LH) and a three-way interaction (BVDV × CF × age). HS-seronegative cattle had 4.7 times greater odds of being BVDV-seropositive compared with HS-seropositive cattle. In contrast, LH-seropositive cattle had 2.7 times increased odds of BVDV seropositivity compared with LH-seronegative cattle. The presence of the three-way interaction term in the model involving age, CF and BVDV seroprevalence implies that among heifers, CF-seronegative and CF-seropositive animals had about the same odds of BVDV seropositivity (e.g. adjusted odds ratios = 20.5 vs. 24.5), whereas, among cows, CF-seronegative animals had at least twice the odds of being BVDV-seropositive than those of CF-seropositive animals (e.g. adjusted odds ratios = 23.0 vs. 11.0).