If you have sequence data on Hepatitis E virus: JOIN HEVnet!
What is HEVnet?
HEVnet is a network and database for sharing sequences and accompanying metadata collected from Hepatitis E virus from human, animal, food and environmental sources.
About Hepatitis E virus (HEV)
HEV is a common cause of acute hepatitis worldwide. In Europe, HEV is a zoonosis transmitted via contaminated pork meat or other pork food products. Genotype 3 is the most prevalent hepatitis E virus type in the animal reservoir, as well as in humans. Despite an increased incidence of hepatitis E across Europe, much remains unknown about its spread, sources and transmission routes. A One Health approach is crucial to better understand the (molecular) epidemiology of HEV.
Some figures about HEVnet
- HEVnet was established in April 2017.
- HEVnet members work in the public health, veterinary health, food, environmental and blood safety sectors.
- They have submitted 1,615 HEV sequences from nine countries as at January 2019.
- Most are from humans (89%), sequences of animal (5%), food (6%) orenvironmental (0.3%) origin are rare.
- Metadata for human sequences capture mostly sex (93%), year of birth (92%) andsampling (100%); data on region of sampling (37%) and clinical information (hospitalisation 27%, symptoms 20% or mortality 8%) are limited.
Why join HEVnet?
HEVnet aims to expand into a global network capable of performing cross-sectoral and supranational studies, with a joint repository of molecular and epidemiological data on HEV. To strengthen the HEVnet database as a One Health platform, it is necessary that HEV experts in the veterinary, food and environmental sectors join the network and add their sequences.
How to join HEVnet?
HEV experts are invited to join HEVnet by sending an email request to [email protected] with a short explanation of what they can contribute to the network and the establishment of a worldwide reference set of HEV sequences.
HEVnet workshop sponsored by MVNA
The Med-Vet-Net Association is sponsoring the next HEVnet meeting on Monday 18 March 2019, which is only open for HEVnet members. If you would like to have more information about this meeting, please contact [email protected] . The program of this meeting can be found here.
An article announcing this data-sharing network has been published by Eurosurveillance:https://www.eurosurveillance.org/content/10.2807/1560-7917.ES.2019.24.10.1800407
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