Marburg virus in Egyptian Rousettus bats in Guinea: Investigation of Marburg virus outbreak origin in 2021

by Marat T. Makenov, Sanaba Boumbaly, Faya Raphael Tolno, Noumouny Sacko, Leno Tamba N ’Fatoma, Oumar Mansare, Bonaventure Kolie, Olga A. Stukolova, Evgeny S. Morozkin, Ivan S. Kholodilov, Olga B. Zhurenkova, Marina V. Fyodorova, Vasily G. Akimkin, Anna Yu. Popova, Namoudou Conde, Mamadou Yero Boiro, Lyudmila S. Karan In 2021, a patient died from Marburg virus (MARV) disease in Guinea and it was the first confirmed case in West Africa. The origin of the outbreak has not been identified. It was revealed that the patient didn ’t travel anywhere before the illness. Prior to outbreak, MARV had been found in bats in the neighboring Sierra Leone, but never in Guinea. Therefore, the origin of infection is unclear: was it an autochthonous case with spillover from a local population of bats or an imported case with spillover from fruit bats foraging/migrating from Sierra Leone? In this paper, we studiedRousettus aegyptiacus in Guinea as the possible source of MARV infection caused the patient death in 2021 in Guinea. We caught bats in 32 sites of Gu éckédou prefecture, including seven caves and 25 locations of the flight path. A total of 501 fruit bats (Pteropodidae) were captured, including 66R.aegyptiacus. The PCR screening showed three positive MARVR.aegyptiacus, roosting in two caves discovered in Gu éckédou prefecture. After Sanger sequencing and phylogenetic analyses it was shown that found MARV belongs to the Angola-like lineage but it is not identical to the isolate o...
Source: PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases - Category: Tropical Medicine Authors: Source Type: research