Experimental infection with the Paderborn isolate of classical swine fever virus in 10-week-old pigs: determination of viral replication kinetics by quantitative RT-PCR, virus isolation and antigen ELISA.

We performed experimental infection in 10-week-old pigs with the Paderborn isolate of classical swine fever virus (CSFV). Despite being epidemiologically linked to the major CSFV outbreak in The Netherlands in 1997, the in vivo replication kinetics of this isolate have to our knowledge not been described in detail previously. We found that oronasal infection with 10(4.7) TCID(50) produced mortality in three out of five pigs after 29-31 days, and severe clinical symptoms in one out of five pigs, while one out of five pigs exhibited no clinical symptoms. At this infection dose, pigs had viral RNA (monitored by quantitative reverse transcription (RT)-PCR) in serum as soon as 2 days post-infection, and excretion of infectious virus (monitored by sentinel pigs) appeared to be virtually concomitant with viremia onset. While virus RNA was cleared from the serum of most pigs after 1-2 weeks, some pigs had viral RNA in serum for more than 30 days, and exhibited only mild clinical symptoms. We observed an excellent correlation between clinical symptoms and viral RNA loads in serum, while serum antibody levels were low. Clinically affected pigs had up to 1000-fold higher serum viral RNA loads than did pigs without clinical symptoms. At this level of infection, and this age group, the Paderborn isolate exhibited a strikingly wide range of replication patterns, which might be relevant to the spread of the virus through susceptible pig populations, and the severity of the 1997-1998 outbreak.