Landscape Genetics of Pandemic Swine Influenza

Keywords: infectious disease, landscape genetics, animal diseases, medical geography
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 03:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 05:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 31

Abstract

Influenza A viruses (IAVs) are responsible for substantial human morbidity and mortality and continue to present a substantial public health challenge. In addition to humans, IAVs can infect birds, pigs, horses, dogs, sea mammals, and a number of other animal species. It has been proposed that pigs are intermediate host “mixing vessels” that generate pandemic IAV strains through genetic reassortment among avian, swine, and/or human IAVs. The genesis and emergence of highly transmissible pandemic viruses is complicated and protracted, requiring multiple reassortment events and mutations across years as seen with the 2009 pandemic H1N1 IAV. Since 2009, novel swine IAVs (SIVs) arising from reassortment between the emerging 2009 pandemic H1N1 virus and enzootic SIVs have frequently been detected in swine populations worldwide, most noticeably in China and the US. A number of these novel SIVs (e.g. avian-like H1N1 in China and H3N2v in the US) have caused sporadic spillovers to humans and raised dynamic levels of concerns that another influenza pandemic may occur. Although evolutionary events (i.e., reassortment and mutations) have been readily documented, it is not yet clear which are typical, which are atypical, which evolutionary events for these IAVs increase threats to human and animal health, and which ecological and evolutionary principals are driving such events. This paper presents preliminary findings from a study that identifies ecological drivers associated with emergence and spread of novel SIVs within swine populations and at the animal-human interface.