Epidemiology and diagnosis of feline panleukopenia virus in Egypt: Clinical and molecular diagnosis in cats

AIM: This work aimed to study epidemiology and diagnosis of feline panleukopenia virus (FPV) using clinical examination, direct ELISA, RNA viral isolation and identification, and knowing phylogenetic tree of our isolate. MATERIALS AND METHODS: One hundred and sixty-five cats of different ages and sex were examined. Each cat was examined clinically to detect the clinical manifestations of the disease showing symptoms suggestive of feline panleukopenia (FP) as well as ELISA, and polymerase chain reaction (PCR) amplification analyses were conducted. RESULTS: Our finding includes (a) clinical signs detected in 165 of 165 cats were in the form of lethargy, fever, anorexia, thirst, vomiting, diarrhea, dehydration, and leukopenia. (b) ELISA results revealed that 66 of all examined cats were positive for FPV. (c) The amplification products from all positive samples were confirmed as FPV (VP1) gene by nucleotide sequences analysis, in which 75 samples were positive using PCR amplification for the FPV. (d) Statistical evaluation of ELISA results in comparison to PCR findings. ELISA showed 88%, 100%, and 94.5% for sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy, respectively, while the prevalence of FP among the examined population was 45%. No effect of sex, breed, and age on ELISA results as recorded using Chi-square analysis. CONCLUSION: The results of the sequence analysis indicated that PCR products of the FPV cDNA exhibited very low variation in their nucleotide sequence of all isolates compared with the published FPV genome, which could be suggested that FPV appears to be genomically stasis compared with other Parvoviruses. The genome sequence of FPLV strain in this study has been deposited in GenBank under the accession number KY466003. Our isolate closely related 100% to isolates from Portugal, which might be the origin of infection to Egypt through importation of cats.