Abstract
We detected Marburg virus RNA in rectal swab samples from Egyptian rousette bats in South Africa in 2017. This finding signifies that fecal contamination of natural bat habitats is a potential source of infection for humans. Identified genetic sequences are closely related to Ravn virus, implying wider distribution of Marburg virus in Africa.
Highlights
We detected Marburg virus RNA in rectal swab samples from Egyptian rousette bats in South Africa in 2017
Of 600 rectal swab samples collected during 3 nights in April, 9 (1.5%) were positive; of 215 rectal swab samples collected during 2 nights in September, 2 (0.9%) were positive
We found no significant difference between the number of positive rectal swab samples collected in April and the number collected September
Summary
We obtained sufficient marburgvirus-specific sequence data only from 1 of the 12 individual positive swab samples for phylogenetic analysis: a rectal swab sample, collected from a juvenile female (bat 8095) in September 2017, from which we recovered 79.2% (15.1/19.1 kb) of the genome. We obtained near-complete coding sequences for the viral protein (VP) 35 (972/990 nt; 98.2%) and VP40 (898/912 nt; 98.5%) genes; coverage ranged from 49.7% (VP24) to 89.3% (glycoprotein) in other open reading frames of the genome. The marburgviruses sequence (strain RSA-2017bat8095) detected from the rectal swab sample of bat 8095 shared a common ancestor with all other RAVV complete or near-complete genome sequences, including 3 human isolates from Kenya [14], Uganda [15], and the Democratic Republic of Congo [3] and several bat isolates from Uganda [4] (Figure 1). We detected seroconversion in 6 (33.3%) of 18 recaptured bats (Table 2)
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