Epidemiological interface of sylvatic and dog rabies in the North West Province of South Africa

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Authors

Malan, Ayla Janina-Bertha
Coetzer, Andre
Sabeta, Claude Taurai
Nel, Louis Hendrik

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MDPI

Abstract

Rabies is a viral zoonosis that causes an estimated 59,000 preventable human fatalities every year. While more than 120 countries remain endemic for dog-mediated rabies, the burden is the highest in Africa and Asia where 99% of human rabies cases are caused by domestic dogs. One such rabies-endemic country is South Africa where an estimated 42 preventable human deaths occur every year. Although canine rabies had been well described for most of the provinces in South Africa, the epidemiology of rabies within the NorthWest Province had not been well defined prior to this investigation. As such, the aim of this study was to use nucleotide sequence analyses to characterise the extant molecular epidemiology of rabies in the North West Province of South Africa—with specific focus on the interface between dogs and sylvatic species. To this end, Rabies lyssavirus isolates originating from the North West Province were subjected to molecular epidemiological analyses relying on the Bayesian Markov Chain Monte Carlo methodology on two distinct gene regions, viz. the G-L intergenic region and partial nucleoprotein gene. Our results provided strong evidence in support of an endemic cycle of canine rabies in the East of the province, and three independent endemic cycles of sylvatic rabies spread throughout the province. Furthermore, evidence of specific events of virus spill-over between co-habiting sylvatic species and domestic dogs was found. These results suggest that the elimination of canine-mediated rabies from the province will rely not only on eliminating the disease from the dog populations, but also from the co-habiting sylvatic populations using oral rabies vaccination campaigns.

Description

SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIALS : TABLE S1: List of RABV sequences included in the phylogenetic analysis for both the partial N gene and G-L intergenic region.
DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT : Publicly available datasets were analysed in this study. This data can be found here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genbank/ (accessed 23 May 2022) according to Accession Numbers used in this study.

Keywords

Rabies, Sylvatic, Molecular epidemiology, Dogs (Canis familiaris), South Africa (SA)

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Citation

Malan, A.J.; Coetzer, A.; Sabeta, C.T.; Nel, L.H. Epidemiological Interface of Sylvatic and Dog Rabies in the NorthWest Province of South Africa. Trop. Med. Infect. Dis. 2022, 7, 90. https://DOI.org/10.3390/ tropicalmed7060090