Tilapia Lake Virus spreading fast

Since 2009, tilapia aquaculture had been threatened by mysterious mass die-offs in farmed fish in Israel and Ecuador[1] and took some time to understand that a Orthomyxovirus was the root cause of the death of these fishes.

In 2016, the world was alerted to Tilapia Lake Virus, a novel Orthomyxovirus, the family of viruses that also includes all the Influenza viruses[2].

Israel and Ecuador are half a world apart and therefore the question was: how did it get from one country to another. The answer was simple, because it now clear that the Tilapia Lake Virus is killing fish on a worldwide scale. Reports have come from Egypt[3], Thailand[4] and Colombia[5].

At the moment, Tilapia Lake Virus has infected tilapia only, no other aquatic or terrestrial animals. The virus is mutating. I won't say more, but you understand my drift.

[1] Aygnor et al: Identification of a novel RNA virus lethal to tilapia in Journal of Clinical Biology - 2014
[2] Bacharach et al: Characterization of a Novel Orthomyxo-like Virus Causing Mass Die-Offs of Tilapia in mBio – 2016. See here.
[3] Nicholson et al: Detection of Tilapia Lake Virus in Egyptian fish farms experiencing high mortalities in 2015 in Journal of Fish Diseases – 2017
[4] Surachetpong et al: Outbreaks of Tilapia Lake Virus Infection, Thailand, 2015-2016 in Journal of Emerging Infectious diseases – 2017. See here.
[5] Kembou Tsofack et al: Detection of Tilapia Lake Virus in Clinical Samples by Culturing and Nested Reverse Transcription-PCR in Journal of Clinical Microbiology - 2017