Taura Syndrome - Geographic Distribution

Geographic Distribution

TSV has been reported from virtually all shrimp-growing regions of the Americas, including Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, Brazil, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Belize, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Costa Rica, and Venezuela, as well as from the States of Hawaii, Texas, Florida and South Carolina. Until 1998, it was considered to be a Western Hemisphere virus. The first Asian outbreak occurred in Taiwan. It has more recently been identified in Thailand, Myanmar, China, Korea and Indonesia, where it has been associated with severe epizootics in farmed Penaeus vannamei and Penaeus monodon.

The wide distribution of the disease has been attributed to the movement of infected host stocks for aquaculture purposes. This might have been helped by the highly stable nature of the virus. Importation of TSV-infected Penaeus vannamei from the Western Hemisphere is thought to have been the origin of the outbreak in Taiwan. This was further suggested by the genomic similarity of the Taiwan and Western Hemisphere isolates. TSV appeared in Thailand in 2003. Due to the similarities in deduced CP2 amino acids sequence and the chronology of the disease outbreaks in relation to imported stocks, it is likely at least some of the Thai isolates originated from Chinese stocks.

Taura syndrome can spread rapidly when introduced in new areas. A shrimp farmer described the 1995 outbreak in Texas as "This thing spread like a forest fire... There was no stopping it. I just sat there and watched it and in a matter of three days, my shrimp were gone. Dead!"