Twenty five years of evolution of viral infections in pigs in Western Europe | Vingt cinq ans d'evolution des infections virales chez le porc en Europe occidentale
1999
Pensaert, M.B. (Universiteit Gent, Merelbeke (Belgium). Faculteit Diergeneeskunde)
In the present article, some evolutionary processes with porcine viruses but also in the knowledge on viral infections in the last decades have been presented. It is clear that the new viruses either originating from other species with adaptation to swine or by genetic modification of existing viruses will continue to emerge. Intensively kept animal species such as swine promote such emergences. Many insights in this evolutionary processes have been obtained thanks to molecular techniques. In viral infections and studies on pathogenesis, organ pathogenesis has been replaced by the studies at the cellular level (molecular pathogenesis). Identification of receptor-ligand interactions, studies on cellular pathobiological events and functions of viral proteins represent new approaches that give better insights at the cellular level. Several porcine viruses have played a pivotal role in acquiring such knowledge and can easily serve for comparative purposes. Molecular studies have given rise to a new discipline which is molecular epidemiology useful for tracing of viruses and studying their origin. Also, marker vaccines with accompanying differential diagnostic kits have shown their value in programmes where the wild type virus is eliminated from the population by intensive and generalised vaccination.
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