Abstract
Hepatitis E virus (HEV) can cause enterically-transmitted hepatitis in humans. The zoonotic nature of Hepatitis E infections has been established in industrialized areas and domestic pigs are considered as the main reservoir. The dynamics of transmission in pig herds therefore needs to be understood to reduce the prevalence of viremic pigs at slaughter and prevent contaminated pig products from entering the food chain. An experimental trial was carried out to study the main characteristics of HEV transmission between orally inoculated pigs and naïve animals. A mathematical model was used to investigate three transmission routes, namely direct contact between pigs and two environmental components to represent within-and between-group oro-fecal transmission. A large inter-individual variability was observed in response to infection with an average latent period lasting 6.9 days (5.8; 7.9) in inoculated animals and an average infectious period of 9.7 days (8.2; 11.2). Our results show that direct transmission alone, with a partial reproduction number of 1.41 (0.21; 3.02), can be considered as a factor of persistence of infection within a population. However, the quantity of virus present in the environment was found to play an essential role in the transmission process strongly influencing the probability of infection with a within pen transmission rate estimated to 2 ⋅ 10− 6g ge− 1d− 1(1 ⋅ 10− 7; 7 ⋅ 10− 6). Between-pen environmental transmission occurred to a lesser extent (transmission rate: 7 ⋅ 10− 8g ge− 1d− 1(5 ⋅ 10− 9; 3 ⋅ 10− 7) but could further generate a within-group process. The combination of these transmission routes could explain the persistence and high prevalence of HEV in pig populations.
Highlights
Hepatitis E virus (HEV) is a small non-enveloped singlestranded virus, sole representative of the Hepeviridae family [1,2,3]
The authors showed that the orofecal route of infection was likely, but not sufficient to explain the observed transmission, and concluded that other transmission routes needed to be considered to explain the dynamics of infection
These previous results provide new insights regarding HEV transmission patterns they are difficult to extend to a real pig farm population that consists of small groups of animals with an extremely heterogeneous contact structure
Summary
Hepatitis E virus (HEV) is a small non-enveloped singlestranded virus, sole representative of the Hepeviridae family [1,2,3]. Genotypes 1 and 2 are exclusively human viruses mainly prevalent in developing countries in Asia, Africa and Central-America [7,8,9] In these areas, hepatitis E occurs both sporadically and in epidemic waves, due to Hepatitis E virus is widespread in domestic pig populations and several studies have shown high prevalence at the herd level with large variations at the individual pig level [17,18,19,20]. The authors showed that the orofecal route of infection was likely, but not sufficient to explain the observed transmission, and concluded that other transmission routes needed to be considered to explain the dynamics of infection These previous results provide new insights regarding HEV transmission patterns they are difficult to extend to a real pig farm population that consists of small groups of animals with an extremely heterogeneous contact structure. The persistence and accumulation of Hepatitis E viruses in the environment due to fecal shedding could be an important factor for viral transmission among pigs and has not been investigated to date
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