Dear Collegues


wishing you all an happy 2019, my Collegues and me are happy to announce two new papers on cetaceans morbillivirus host range. The most recent one is a brief report on dolphin morbillivirus host range with a new species involved in Italy (river otters). This paper follows another relevant one published on the evolutionary evidences for multi-host transmission on cetacean morbillivirus published in December 2018. References for the two articles are here below reported.



Padalino I, Di Guardo G, Carbone A, Troiano P, Parisi A, Galante D, et al. Dolphin morbillivirus in Eurasian otters, Italy. Emerg Infect Dis. 2019 Feb

We report biomolecular evidence of dolphin morbillivirus in 4 wild Eurasian otters (Lutra lutra) from southern Italy; 2 animals showed simultaneous immunohistochemical reactivity against morbilliviral antigen. These cases add further concern and support to the progressively expanding host range of dolphin morbillivirus in the western Mediterranean Sea.


The article is ahead of print and you can read it at the following web address https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/25/2/18-0256_article#suggestedcitation




Jo WK, Kruppa J, Habierski A, van de Bildt M, Mazzariol S, Di Guardo G, Siebert U, Kuiken T, Jung K, Osterhaus A, Ludlow M. Evolutionary evidence for multi-host transmission of cetacean morbillivirus. Emerg Microbes Infect. 2018 Dec 5;7(1):201.


Cetacean morbillivirus (CeMV) has emerged as the pathogen that poses the greatest risk of triggering epizootics in cetacean populations worldwide, and has a high propensity for interspecies transmission, including sporadic infection of seals. In this study, we investigated the evolutionary history of CeMV by deep sequencing wild-type viruses from tissue samples representing cetacean species with different spatiotemporal origins. Bayesian phylogeographic analysis generated an estimated evolutionary rate of 2.34 × 10-4 nucleotide substitutions/site/year and showed that CeMV evolutionary dynamics are neither host-restricted nor location-restricted. Moreover, the dolphin morbillivirus strain of CeMV has undergone purifying selection without evidence of species-specific mutations. Cell-to-cell fusion and growth kinetics assays demonstrated that CeMV can use both dolphin and seal CD150 as a cellular receptor. Thus, it appears that CeMV can readily spread among multiple cetacean populations and may pose an additional spillover risk to seals.

Download at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41426-018-0207-x



All the best

Sandro Mazzariol



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Dr. Sandro Mazzariol, DVM, PhD
Dipartimento di Biomedicina Comparata e Alimentazione (BCA)
Università degli Studi di Padova
Cetaceans strandings Emergency Response Team (CERT)

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