Current Status of Porcine Epidemic Diarrhoea (PED) in European Pigs

Antas, Marta; Wozniakowski, Grzegorz

PED was first observed in the United Kingdom and Belgium in early 1970s (1) . The disease caused mortality of about 3% in fatteners and adult pigs. Suckling piglets were not affected and remained symptom-free even when the sows had watery diarrhoea for several days. At the beginning, the disease was incorrectly diagnosed as TGE because the symptoms of these two diseases are almost identical. At a later stage, TGE was excluded by laboratory diagnosis. In 1976, new cases of the disease were described in the UK. This outbreak was different in that the virus affected pigs of all ages, including neonatal and suckling piglets, inflicting around 30% mortality. PEDV was definitively identified for the first time in 1977 in Belgium and was classified to the Coronaviridae family, recorded as the CV777prototype strain (19, 22) . In the 1980s and 1990s, PEDV was identified as the cause of severe epidemics in Japan and South Korea (17) . In the same period in Europe, outbreaks of PED appeared sporadically but the virus continued to spread and persisted in an endemic form in the pig population. Outbreaks of PED were observed in the Netherlands in 1989-1991, in Hungary in 1995, and in the UK in 1998. Typical epidemic outbreaks of PED with high mortality in neonatal piglets were also identified in Italy in [2005] [2006] and China in 2010-2012 (8, 32) .