An Outbreak of Bovine Ephemeral Fever in Okinawa Prefecture in 1989

Abstract

In May and June 1989, 333 cattle suffered from pyrexia, anorexia, shortness of breath, orbital edema, muscular tremor, and ataxia in the Yaeyama Islands, Okinawa Prefecture. A neutralizing antibody against bovine ephemeral fever (BEF) virus was detected in 26 of 41 (63%) serum samples collected from these cattle. Eight cytopathogenic viral strains were isolated in the HmLu-1 cells, and neutralized with antiserum against the YHL strain of the BEF virus. From these results, the present cases were diagnosed as BEF.-Key Words: bovine ephemeral fever, BEF virus, epidemiology.

Occurrence of bovine ephemeral fever in Okinawa Prefecture, Japan, in 2012 and development of a reverse-transcription polymerase chain reaction assay to detect bovine ephemeral fever virus gene

“…In Japan, the first epidemic of BEF was reported in 1953 and then occurred frequently in the 1960s [ 6 , 11 ], but no BEFV activity has been observed since 1992 in Japan, except for Okinawa Prefecture, in the southwestern part of Japan. Epidemics of BEF in Okinawa were reported in 1988, 1989, 2001 and 2004, but no epidemic has been reported on the main islands of Japan since 1989 [ 1 , 7 , 12 ].…”