抄録
In order to study the epidemiology of human parechovirus (HPeV) infections and evaluate the feasibility of environmental surveillance, we investigated HPeV in 281 stool, 265 nasopharyngeal swab, and 79 municipal wastewater samples collected in Miyagi Prefecture, Japan between April 2012 and March 2014. HPeV was detected by reverse transcription-PCR targeting the partial 5’ untranslated region and genotyped by sequencing the capsid VP1 region. Seven stool (2.5%) and one nasopharyngeal swab (0.4%) samples, all of which were from children under 2 years old, and 14 wastewater (18%) samples were positive for HPeVs. Clear seasonality was observed: all positive samples were collected between July and December during the study period. All strains detected from the stool and wastewater samples belonged to HPeV1, and the strain from the nasopharyngeal swab sample belonged to HPeV6. The phylogenetic analysis revealed that all HPeV1 strains from the stool samples clustered together with those from the wastewater samples, indicating that the HPeV1 strains circulating in human populations can also be detected by analyzing municipal wastewater.
