Phocine Distemper Virus in Seals, East Coast, United States, 2006

• Main Authors: J. A. Philip Earle, Mary M. Melia, Nadine V. Doherty, Ole Nielsen, S. Louise Cosby
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Kattegat; Phoca vitulina
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.288.5037

seals, constituting an unusual mortality event, occurred off the coasts of Maine and Massachusetts, United States. We isolated a virus from seal tissue and confi rmed it as phocine distemper virus (PDV). We compared the viral hemagglutinin, phosphoprotein, and fusion (F) and matrix (M) protein gene sequences with those of viruses from the 1988 and 2002 PDV epizootics. The virus showed highest similarity with a PDV 1988 Netherlands virus, which raises the possibility that the 2006 isolate from the United States might have emerged independently from 2002 PDVs and that multiple lineages of PDV might be circulating among enzootically infected North American seals. Evidence from comparison of sequences derived from different tissues suggested that mutations in the F and M genes occur in brain tissue that are not present in lung, liver, or blood, which suggests virus persistence in the central nervous system. In 1988, harbor seals (Phoca vitulina) and gray seals (Halichoerus grypus) died in large numbers off the coast of northern Europe (1). A virus was first isolated in April 1988, when widespread abortions and deaths among harbor seals were reported in the Kattegat area between Denmark and Sweden. The infection spread to the North, Wadden, and Baltic seas, killing 17,000–20,000 seals in northwestern Europe in 8 months. The virus subsequently was classified as a species of the genus Morbillivirus (family Paramyxoviridae) (2,3), Phocine distemper virus (PDV). The virus is believed to have originated in harp seals in which the infection is enzootic (4). Migrations of harp seals into the North