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Editorial overview: Emerging viruses: interspecies transmission

A. Gessain,F. García-Arenal

Published 2015 in Current Opinion in Virology

ABSTRACT

Emergent viruses and associated diseases comprise various and rather quite distinct entities, which can arise in a large part of the living world. Indeed, emerging viruses have been, and are still, frequently reported in a great variety of animals, from insects to humans, as well as in plants. Furthermore, some of these diseases, associated with emerging viruses, had recent major public health impact, as exemplified in humans by the AIDS [1], hepatitis C pandemics [2], or the current Ebola disease epidemic, or in crops by cassava mosaic disease, which seriously compromises food security in East Africa [3]. How can we define such emerging entities? Firstly, it can be a new disease, due to a yet unknown virus. In humans, the natural reservoir of such a virus is frequently an animal. These zoonoses include some coronaviruses present in specific bat species and the severe acute respiratory syndrome, hantaviruses present in rodents and various clinical syndromes, and some filoviruses, as Marburg and Ebola viruses, living in fruit bats and the associated hemorrhagic fevers. For plants, new viruses in crops are also thought to emerge from wild reservoirs: for instance, the Maize streak virus originates from wild African grasses. Strictly speaking, these are considered as real emergences. Secondly, it may be a known disease, in which one finds the causative viral agent. Here, we can cite for human diseases, some clinical hepatitis and the hepatitis C virus, the severe Adult T cell leukemia/lymphoma and the human retrovirus HTLV-1, as well as a the Kaposi’s sarcoma and the human herpesvirus 8. Examples in plants would be the identification of virus complexes associated with many known diseases of perennial crops, for example, grapevine leaf roll disease. Here, we are rather talking about ‘emergence of knowledge’. Finally, it may be an already known virus, associated with a known disease, but with an epidemiological profile different from what was known before. We can mention the spread of West Nile virus in the United States in the early 2000s, the arrival of Chikungunya in the American continent in 2013, the dramatic current Ebola outbreak in West Africa, or the world-wide emergence in different temperate crops of Tomato yellow leaf curl and other begomoviruses associated with the spread of highly efficient vector species.

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