Researchers from the Institut Cavanilles for biodiversity and evolutionary biology, the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), the CRESA (researching centre of animal health), and the CRAM (the Foundation for the Conservation and Recovery of Marine Animals) have described a chronic infection, Morbillivirus in dolphins (DVM). It affects Mediterranean striped dolphins (Stenella coeruleoalba). The research results were published in the last edition of Diseases of Aquatic Organisms.
According to the research, the deaths of this species after the epidemic in 2006-07 along the Valencian, Catalan and Andalusian coasts are due to the evolution of the infection by Morbillivirus and not to new epidemics.
The analyses have shown that there is chronic phase in the Morbillivirus infection which would explain the death of dolphins in the last years. ‘The virus remains latent in some of the survivors of these massive deaths. It remains in a chronic state, limited to the nervous system, but they cannot spread it, so we cannot speak about a new epidemic’, states the full professor in Zoology of the University of Valencia, Juan Antonio Raga. The deaths are due to an increase in the dolphin population density and the consequent decrease in the immune protection. ‘The ones dying are those affected by the previous epidemic, as the one in 1990 and 2006-07, which caused mass deaths’, adds Raga.
This results continue with a multidisciplinary and inter-university study, which has been developed since 1990 and has allowed the description of these two massive deaths in the Mediterranean for the first time in the world.
More information on: www.uv.es/cdciencia
Last update: 17 de november de 2011 12:14.
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