Australian Animal Health Laboratory, CSIRO Livestock Industries, East Geelong, Victoria, Australia.
PLoS One. 2011;6(9):e25275. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0025275. Epub 2011 Sep 28.
Hendra virus (HeV) causes a zoonotic disease with high mortality that is transmitted to humans from bats of the genus Pteropus (flying foxes) via an intermediary equine host. Factors promoting spillover from bats to horses are uncertain at this time, but plausibly encompass host and/or agent and/or environmental factors. There is a lack of HeV sequence information derived from the natural bat host, as previously sequences have only been obtained from horses or humans following spillover events. In order to obtain an insight into possible variants of HeV circulating in flying foxes, collection of urine was undertaken in multiple flying fox roosts in Queensland, Australia. HeV was found to be geographically widespread in flying foxes with a number of HeV variants circulating at the one time at multiple locations, while at times the same variant was found circulating at disparate locations. Sequence diversity within variants allowed differentiation on the basis of nucleotide changes, and hypervariable regions in the genome were identified that could be used to differentiate circulating variants. Further, during the study, HeV was isolated from the urine of flying foxes on four occasions from three different locations. The data indicates that spillover events do not correlate with particular HeV isolates, suggesting that host and/or environmental factors are the primary determinants of bat-horse spillover. Thus future spillover events are likely to occur, and there is an on-going need for effective risk management strategies for both human and animal health.
亨德拉病毒（HeV）可引起一种高死亡率的人畜共患病，通过中间马宿主从果蝠属（狐蝠）蝙蝠传播给人类。目前尚不确定促使蝙蝠向马溢出的因素，但可能包括宿主和/或病原体和/或环境因素。由于以前仅在溢出事件发生后从马或人类中获得了序列，因此缺乏来自天然蝙蝠宿主的 HeV 序列信息。为了深入了解在狐蝠中循环的可能的 HeV 变体，在澳大利亚昆士兰州的多个狐蝠栖息地进行了尿液收集。结果发现，HeV 在狐蝠中分布广泛，在多个地点同时存在多种 HeV 变体循环，而有时在不同地点发现相同的变体循环。变体内部的序列多样性允许根据核苷酸变化进行区分，并且鉴定出基因组中的高变区，可用于区分循环变体。此外，在研究期间，从来自三个不同地点的四只狐蝠尿液中分离出了 HeV。这些数据表明，溢出事件与特定的 HeV 分离株无关，这表明宿主和/或环境因素是蝙蝠-马溢出的主要决定因素。因此，未来仍有可能发生溢出事件，并且仍然需要针对人类和动物健康制定有效的风险管理策略。
