High detection rate of dog circovirus in diarrheal dogs

BACKGROUND Diarrhea is one of the most common clinical symptoms reported in companion animal clinics. Dog circovirus (DogCV) is a new mammalian circovirus that is considered to be a cause of alimentary syndromes such as diarrhea, vomiting and hemorrhagic enteritis. DogCV has previously only been identified in the United States, Italy, Germany (GeneBank accession number: KF887949) and China (GeneBank accession number: KT946839). Therefore, the aims of this study were to determine the prevalence of DogCV in Taiwan and to explore the correlation between diarrhea and DogCV infection. Clinical specimens were collected between 2012 and 2014 from 207 dogs suffering from diarrhea and 160 healthy dogs. RESULTS In this study, we developed a sensitive and specific SYBR Green-based real-time PCR assays to detected DogCV in naturally infected animals. Of the analyzed fecal samples from diarrheal dogs and health dogs, 58 (28.0 %) and 19 (11.9 %), respectively, were DogCV positive. The difference in DogCV prevalence was highly significant (P = 0.0002755) in diarrheal dogs. CONCLUSIONS This is the first study to reveal that DogCV is currently circulating in domestic dogs in Taiwan and to demonstrate its high detection rate in dogs with diarrhea.