Abstract
Seroprevalence data for pig herds suggested that there must be a relevant reservoir for hepatitis E virus (HEV) in Switzerland. To know more about the viral presence in ready-to-eat meat products, we screened pork liver sausages and raw meat sausages from the Swiss retail market for the presence of HEV. Testing was performed with a detection method where the virus extraction step was optimized. As for the performance of the improved method, the mean recovery rate for the mengovirus process control was 24.4%, whereas for HEV-inoculated sample matrices between 10.4 and 100% were achieved. The limit of detection was about 1.56 × 103 and 1.56 × 102 genome copies per gram for liver sausages and raw meat sausages, respectively. In the screening programme, HEV-RNA was detected in 10 of total 90 (11.1%) meat products, 7 of 37 (18.9%) liver sausages, and 3 of 53 (5.7%) raw meat sausages. Virus loads of up to 5.54 log10 HEV genome copies per gram were measured. All sequences retrieved from positive samples belonged to HEV genotype 3. The significance of the presented work was a current overview of the HEV prevalence in ready-to-eat meat products on the Swiss retail marked and an improvement of the extraction efficiency of the HEV detection method.
Highlights
In Europe, the most important enteric viruses are hepatitis A virus (HAV), norovirus, enterovirus, rotavirus, and astrovirus (Le Guyader et al 2000)
Our first attempts to establish a published method for hepatitis E virus (HEV) detection (Szabo et al 2015) from 2-g samples of a liver sausage containing 18% pork liver resulted in low extraction recovery rates of the MS2 process control of 0.001% (Tables 2, 3)
The range of recovery rates was between 0.04 and 1.92%, whereas for the same sample matrix inoculated with HEV a recovery rate of 4.9% was achieved
Summary
In Europe, the most important enteric viruses are hepatitis A virus (HAV), norovirus, enterovirus, rotavirus, and astrovirus (Le Guyader et al 2000). Hepatitis E virus (HEV) increasingly received attention in recent past This agent occurs worldwide with an estimated number of 20 million cases and 56,000 fatalities per year. In recent years HEV was isolated from swine suggesting that hepatitis E is a zoonotic disease (Worm et al 2002) and in Germany, it was shown that this zoonotic reservoir is responsible for autochthonous sporadic cases (Wichmann et al 2008). Another investigation showed a rather high HEV-seroprevalence of 16.8% indicating that HEV is endemic in Germany (Faber et al 2012). In France for example, a group of wedding participants got infected due to the consumption of an undercooked pork liver-based stuffing (Guillois et al 2016) and in Australia, pork liver pâté served in a restaurant caused an outbreak (Yapa et al 2016)
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