Analysis of the epidemiological characteristics and phylogeography of rabies prevalent in Hunan Province,1979-2010

Objective To analyze the epidemic and genetic characteristics of rabies prevalent in Hunan Province,1979-2010.Methods Retrospective and descriptive epidemiology were applied to analyze the dynamic distribution in space,time and crowd on the basis of the rabies data collected in the recent 32 years.A local rabies N gene database of Hunan Province was established according to the reporting of GenBank and EMBL by PubMed-Entrez Search software,the characteristics and variation of N gene of all selected sequences were analyzed by bioinformatics methods.The antigenic and genetic of the virus N gene was analyzed after the phylogenetic tree was constructed by Clustal W 1.83 and MEGA 5.0.4 software.Results There were 12 576 rabies cases reported in the recent 32 years in Hunan Province and the total mortality rate was about 0.69/100 000,which scattered in the whole province including 124 counties.Most of the cases were centralized in the south and central areas of Hunan Province and nearly 43.23% of the cases occurred from July to October,64.35% of the cases were farmers.The average content of GC and AT was respectively 44.49% and 55.51% of the 58 strains and the average single strand molecular weight was about 409.7 KDa.The highest content of amino acid component was Leu,while the lowest content was Trp.All of Hunan strains had a relatively genetic relationship to the Guizhou and Guangxi strains and 58 strains isolated in Hunan were belonged to rabies gene typeⅠafter the phylogenetic tree was successfully built.Conclusions The rabies epidemic situation has a large fluctuation in recent 32 years in Hunan Province,the 58 isolated strains are quite stabilize and have no critical variation.