Classical swine fever virus in South-Eastern Europe—Retrospective analysis of the disease situation and molecular epidemiology

Classical swine fever (CSF) is among the most important diseases of domestic pigs and causes great socio-economic losses. Therefore, control of CSF is given high priority within the European Union, including financial support of concerted control actions in candidate and in potential candidate countries. Unfortunately, from some of these countries information on the CSF situation and related data is very limited. This study was undertaken to gather all available information on the domestic pig population and husbandry, and of the CSF situation in domestic pigs and wild boar in South-Eastern European countries that have recently joined or are applying to join the European Union. A characteristic feature of pig production in Eastern Europe is that most of them are in backyard holdings. Although mandatory vaccination is carried out in most of these countries, sporadic CSF outbreaks still occur. Little is still known about the CSF situation in wild boar. In addition, molecular epidemiology of 97 CSF virus isolates available from these countries, from outbreaks that occurred between 1994 and 2007, was performed. Most of the isolates were from Romania and Bulgaria. Genetic typing showed that almost all isolates (with exception of Croatian and of the Macedonian isolates) belonged to genotype 2.3. On the basis of these sequences, and additional sequences from outbreaks in Eastern and Western European countries taken from the database held at the European Union Reference Laboratory (EURL), two clusters could be distinguished within subtype 2.3. They were tentatively named 2.3.1 and 2.3.2.