Isolation of bovine adenovirus type 1 from a calf with pneumo-enteritis

During the last decade, an increasing number of bovine adenoviruses have been isolated from calves suffering from more, or less, well-defined syndromes. These have consisted of respiratory disorders of varying severity, enteritis, or a combination of both, which in typical cases has been termed “pneumo-enteritis”. These investigations have been reviewed by Darbyshire (1968). Wilcox (1969) isolated adenoviruses from kerato-conjunctivitis (KC) in cattle. Furthermore, strains have been isolated from apparently healthy animals (Darbyshire 1968), and from tissue cultures prepared from various organs from calves such as kidneys (Scho- pov et al. 1968), and testes (Rondhuis 1968, Bartha & Csontos 1969). At the present time 9 serotypes of bovine adenoviruses exist, as determined by neutralization tests, and these have recently been reviewed by Guenov et al. (1970). However, several strains, some from cases of pneumonia (Cole 1970, Lupini et al. 1970) and others from KC (Wilcox 1969) remain to be typed and compared with the known prototypes, thereby enabling possible new serotypes to be identified. So far, serotypes 1 and 2 (Darbyshire et al. 1969), serotype 3 (Darbyshire et al. 1966) and serotypes 4 and 5 (Aldasy et al. 1965) have been shown to cause pneumo-enteritis, and serotype 6 (Rondhuis 1970) a mild respiratory disease in experimentally infected calves. Similarly, KC has been produced experimentally by Wilcox (1970), while the pathogenicity for experimental animals of the other typed and untyped strains remains to be investigated.