Epidemiology and vaccine of porcine epidemic diarrhea virus in China: a mini-review

SUN, Dongbo; WANG, Xinyu; WEI, Shan; CHEN, Jianfei; FENG, Li

PEDV is an enveloped, single-stranded, positive-sense RNA virus that belongs to the order Nidovirales, family Coronaviridae and genus Alphacoronavirus. In 1971, the first reported PED outbreak occurred in pig populations in England, and PEDV was confirmed to cause PED in 1978 [30] . Thus far, PED has been reported in swine-farming countries in Asia, Europe, North America [7, 17, 20, 29, 32] . In 1973, an acute diarrheal disease similar to swine transmissible gastroenteritis (TGE) was first reported in Shanghai, China; however, the causative agent of this disease was not confirmed to be PEDV until 1984 [41] . From 1984 to early 2010, PEDV infections occurred in the pig population in China, but there were no large-scale outbreaks [3, 6] . Starting from the end of 2010, PEDV outbreaks occurred in the Chinese pig population and caused enormous economic losses [1, 2, 4, 20, 22, 42] . Because of the severity of PED, extensive, in-depth studies of PEDV have been performed during the past five years in China.