Detection of West Nile Virus in Oral and Cloacal Swabs Collected from Bird Carcasses

Abstract

We evaluated if postmortem cloacal and oral swabs could replace brain tissue as a specimen for West Nile virus (WNV) detection. WNV was detected in all three specimen types from 20 dead crows and jays with an average of >105 WNV PFU in each. These findings suggest that testing cloacal or oral swabs might be a low-resource approach to detect WNV in dead birds.

Keywords

• bird mortality
• fecal shedding
• Flaviviridae
• flavivirus
• United States
• viral RNA detection