Importance of wildlife in the circulation and maintenance of SAT1 and SAT2 foot-and-mouth disease viruses in Africa

Author summary Foot and mouth disease (FMD) viruses are endemic in sub-Saharan Africa. Due to the complexity of the disease epidemiology and the lack of available data, there is a need to use phylogenetic approaches to understand the role of potential hosts involved in the circulation and maintenance of the viruses. The uneven host sampling of the available sequences requires us to take advantage of the recent advances in phylogenetic reconstruction. Therefore, using two structural coalescent model approximations we estimated the circulation of FMD virus serotypes SAT1 and SAT2 between cattle, buffalo and impala populations. Our results suggest that in Africa, the impala population seems to act as an intermediate host between the cattle and buffalo populations and play a more important role in the circulation of the viruses than was previously suspected. Until now, the role of the impala population in the circulation of FMDV has been suggested, but never explicitly shown.