1 INTRODUCTION
In China, pets are increasingly becoming an integral part of people’s
lives, while the viral infectious diseases showed great threat to cat
health.
Felid
species are susceptible to all pathogens that infect the domestic
cat
(Filoni et al., 2012). The infection of
Feline herpetovirus type 1 (FHV-1),
Feline
Panleukopenia Virus (FPV), Feline calicivirus (FCV) in tiger and cheetah
have been reported in
China
(Chen, 2013;
Gao et al., 2003;
Qiu et al., 2000). FCV and FHV-1 are the
main viral pathogens of upper respiratory tract infection in cats, and
FHV causes rhinotracheitis that also named feline viral rhinotracheitis
virus, while the FCV often causes stomatitis, gingivitis and
circumscribed lesions of the
tongue.
FPV infections are
highly
contagious in all members of the family Felidae, resulting in high
mortality, panleukopenia and
serious
enteric symptom
(Yang
et al., 2008). The infection of feline leukemia virus
(FeLV),
feline immunodeficiency virus (FIV)
and feline infectious peritonitis
virus (FIPV) have been reported in China
(Chang, de Groot, Egberink, & Rottier,
2010; Cong et al., 2016;
Pan, Wang, & Wang, 2018). The infection
of FeLV and FIV in domestic cats would cause clinical disease worldwide
(Arjona et al., 2007), in which,
FeLV is mainly associated with
lymphoma, leukemia, and anemia
(Lutz
et al., 2009), and FIV is associated with immune suppression and could
be used as an animal model for AIDS research
(Bendinelli et al., 1995).
Due to the lack of epidemiology on infectious diseases and
seroprevalence of viral pathogens of cat national wide, the aim of the
study was to investigate the prevalence of FHV-1, FeLV, FPV, FCV, FIV
and FIPV of cat in China. Nucleotide detection of
1,326
samples collected from Harbin, Shenyang, Hohhot, Tangshan, Tianjin,
Beijing, Langfang, Shijiazhuang, Qingdao, Zhengzhou, Luoyang, Hefei,
Chongqing, Taizhou, Guangzhou and Haikou were conducted from 2016 to
2019, together with the serological analysis of the infection of FCV,
FHV-1 and FPV.