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. 2024 Jul 23:2024:4008946.
doi: 10.1155/2024/4008946. eCollection 2024.

Abortion and Lethal Septicaemia in Sows Caused by a Non-ST194 Streptococcus equi subsp. zooepidemicus

Ervin Albert  1   2 , István Emil Kis  1 , Krisztián Kiss  3 , Katalin K-Jánosi  1 , Matheus de Oliveira Costa  4   5 , György Tolnai  6 , Imre Biksi  1
Affiliations

Abortion and Lethal Septicaemia in Sows Caused by a Non-ST194 Streptococcus equi subsp. zooepidemicus

Ervin Albert et al. Transbound Emerg Dis. .

Abstract

Outbreaks of zoonotic Streptococcus equi subsp. zooepidemicus (SEZ) have caused severe epidemics in the pig sector since the 1970s in Southeastern Asia, China, and more recently North America. Cases of high mortality caused by peracute septicaemia were all attributed to strains of a highly virulent clonal lineage belonging to the sequence type (ST) 194. In Europe, only two outbreaks have been reported with similar features, caused by other sequence types. In August 2023, a febrile disease followed by abortion and subsequent death was observed among sows kept in a small-scale organic pig farm in West Hungary. Symptoms, pathological lesions, and microbiological findings were suggestive of septicaemia from bacterial origin caused by SEZ. According to the results of the routine laboratory testing, no other relevant infectious agents were involved. Whole-genome sequence analysis assigned the examined strains to ST138, unrelated to any of the European isolates. It also revealed a few common SEZ virulence genes, compared to the highly virulent ST194 strains. A sudden weather change and subsequent extremely high average daily temperature before the outbreak could be identified as the only predisposing factor. The immediate antibiotic treatment and applied biosecurity measures might have helped to restrict and terminate the outbreak. To our knowledge, this is the first report on abortion and lethal septicaemia in sows from Central and Eastern Europe. The results call attention to the potential of non-ST194 SEZ strains to cause outbreaks in pig farms.

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Conflict of interest statement

This study was supported by the intramural strategic research fund of the University of Veterinary Medicine, Budapest. None other than the authors had an interest in the outcome of the current work. All the processes in this work, including conception, planning, research design, analysis, and preparing the manuscript were decided by the authors, independently from any of interests. Thus, the authors have no conflicts of interest to declare regarding the publication of this article.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Phylogenetic comparison of S. equi subsp. zooepidemicus (SEZ) whole-genome sequences obtained from the outbreak described in this study (red, bold characters) and other S. equi isolates from public databases. The tree was constructed based on codon differences of 1,000 randomly chosen shared genes of the strains within the BV-BRC online platform [31]. Tree scale bar indicates the number of codon substitutions per site. Only bootstrap values <100 are shown. Coloured shadings indicate the highly clonal subpopulation of virulent S. equi subsp. zooepidemicus sequence type 194 (red) and the distantly related cluster of S. equi subsp. equi (SEE) sequences (blue). Non-ST194 S. equi subsp. zooepidemicus strains from pigs are bolded.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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