Simian hepatitis A virus derived from a captive rhesus monkey in India is similar to the strain isolated from wild African green monkeys in Kenya

A simian hepatitis A virus (HAV) was identified retrospectively in a faecal sample from a rhesus monkey in India, inoculated in 1995 with a faecal suspension from a suspected patient of non‐A to E hepatitis. The monkey was in captivity for 2 years in one of the experimental primate facilities in western India before being moved to the National Institute of Virology, Pune for experimentation. Phylogenetic analysis based on a partial sequence of the 5′ noncoding region placed this virus in genotype V, the only other member being the AGM‐27 strain recovered in 1986 from African green monkeys in Kenya. The source of infection of the monkey remains unclear. The full genome was amplified in nine fragments and sequenced. The genome of the Indian simian HAV (IND‐SHAV) is 7425 nucleotides long including the poly‐A tail of 14 nucleotides at the 3′ end. At the nucleotide and amino acid levels, IND‐SHAV was 99.8 and 100% identical with AGM27, respectively.