Acute middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus infection in livestock Dromedaries, Dubai, 2014

Abstract

Camels carry Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus, but little is known about infection age or prevalence. We studied >800 dromedaries of all ages and 15 mother-calf pairs. This syndrome constitutes an acute, epidemic, and time-limited infection in camels <4 years of age, particularly calves. Delayed social separation of calves might reduce human infection risk.

Keywords: Dubai; MERS-CoV; Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus; camels; coronavirus; dromedaries; livestock; transmission; viruses.

Figure

Phylogenetic analyses of the complete concatenated coding sequences of available Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) genomes were done by using MrBayes v3.1 (http://mrbayes.sourceforge.net/) and a general time-reversible plus gamma distribution plus invariable site nucleotide substitution model with 2,000,000 generations sampled every 100 steps. Trees were annotated by using the last 75% of all generated trees in TreeAnnotator v.1.5 (http://beast.bio.ed.ac.uk/TreeAnnotator/) and visualized with FigTree v.1.4 (http://tree.bio.ed.ac.uk/software/figtree/). Statistical support of grouping based on Bayesian posterior probabilities is shown at all nodes (95% highest posterior density; shown if value >0.7). Red indicates the 9 camel MERS-CoV strains characterized in this study; blue indicates MERS-CoV sequences obtained from other camels. EMC, Erasmus Medical Centre; FRA, France; HKU, Hong Kong University; KFU, King Faisal University; KSA, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia; UAE, United Arab Emirates; USA, United States of America.