Epidemiology, control, and prevention of Newcastle disease in endemic regions: Latin America

Abstract

Newcastle disease (ND) infects wild birds and poultry species worldwide, severely impacting the economics of the poultry industry. ND is especially problematic in Latin America (Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, and Peru) where it is either endemic or re-emerging. The disease is caused by infections with one of the different strains of virulent avian Newcastle disease virus (NDV), recently renamed Avian avulavirus 1. Here, we describe the molecular epidemiology of Latin American NDVs, current control and prevention methods, including vaccines and vaccination protocols, as well as future strategies for control of ND. Because the productive, cultural, economic, social, and ecological conditions that facilitate poultry endemicity in South America are similar to those in the developing world, most of the problems and control strategies described here are applicable to other continents.

Keywords: Disease control; Endemic; Epidemiology; Evolution; Newcastle disease; Vaccines.

Fig. 1

Phylogenetic tree constructed using the complete nucleotide sequences of the fusion gene of representative isolates of avian Avulavirus class I and class II showing the evolutionary relation of 18 current genotypes of Newcastle disease virus, including the subgenotypes of genotype V (Dimitrov et al. 2016c)

Fig. 2

a Molecular phylogenetic analysis of Newcastle disease isolates by maximum likelihood method. Analysis of the full fusion protein was performed as described in the section 2. The tree is drawn to scale, with branch lengths measured in the number of substitutions per site. The analysis involved 68 amino acid sequences. All positions containing gaps and missing data were eliminated. There was a total of 550 positions in the final dataset. Evolutionary analyses were conducted in MEGA5. Virulent viruses utilized in vaccination experiment are highlighted in yellow (virulent viruses) and vaccine viruses are highlighted in orange. b Fusion protein amino acid differences between the LaSota and B1 vaccine viruses compared to selected vaccine and virulent challenge viruses (Miller et al. 2013b)