A Century of Swine Influenza: Is It Really Just about the Pigs?

Abstract

Influenza viruses (IV) are one of the major threats to human and animal health worldwide due to the variety of species they affect. Pigs play an important role in IV ecology as the “mixing vessel,” since they can be infected by swine, avian and human IV, allowing the appearance of new subtypes. Human viruses originated in swine are known as IV of swine origin or swine influenza virus (SwIV) variants. In this study, we identified knowledge tendencies of SwIV and assessed potential bias in the literature caused by these variants. We identified the most mentioned SwIV variants and manually reviewed the literature to determine the number of publications applying the whole influenza nomenclature, a partial nomenclature, only the subtype or mixed terminology, along with the proportion of articles in which the GenBank ID number was available. We observed that the 2009 H1N1 human pandemic created an important bias in SwIV research driven by an increase in human publications on the IV of swine origin. H1N1 is the most studied subtype for swine and humans, followed by H3N2. We found differences between the nomenclatures applied, where partial classifications were slightly more common. Finally, from all the publications, only 25% stated the GenBank ID of the sequence studied. This review represents the most complete exploration of trends in SwIV knowledge to date and will serve as a guidance for future search strategies in SwIV research.

Keywords

• bibliometrics
• swine influenza virus
• influenza variants
• GenBank
• global health