Long time friend and beneficiary of SOJAA funding, Dr. Christopher Cebra, DVM and colleagues at Oregon State University are about to embark upon a study to:

1) determine the incubation period from infection to symptoms with coronavirus (CoV),
2) the length of time that virus is shed from both the feces and nasal mucosa,
3) the length of time the virus remains in the environment and
4) whether or not the strain of CoV that causes diarrheal disease in alpacas is capable of producing a respiratory infection such as was seen in the ARS outbreak of 2007.

Dr. Cebra’s work is based upon a previous study conducted by Ling Jin, PhD at Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon. Dr. Jin sequenced the genome of a CoV from an alpaca with diarrheal disease and compared it to that of several common bovine CoVs.

Her study has been published in the Journal of Virology, 365, 198-203, 2007. Overall, alpaca CoV was found to be very similar to the type II bovine CoVs that cause diarrhea and respiratory disease in cattle.

Close analysis suggests that the alpaca CoV shares a common ancestor with two of the bovine type II viruses. An interesting finding of this study was that the structure of the alpaca CoV is different from the bovine CoVs at a particular region of the genome that plays an important role in determining species specificity. This finding may explain the increased susceptibility of alpacas to the unique virus isolated from alpaca.
Dr. Crossley, and her colleagues at the Animal Health and Food Safety Laboratory, Davis California, will undertake the sequencing of the genome of a CoV isolated from the lung of an alpaca with ARS. From the sequence they will determine whether the alpaca CoV is the same or different from the CoV that it causes diarrhea in alpacas and causes both respiratory disease and diarrhea in cattle.

Both studies will increase knowledge within the alpaca industry of the many factors that surely contributed to the Fall ’07 outbreak in our alpacas and hopefully provide valuable data for preventing further outbreaks.