White spot syndrome
viral infection
White spot syndrome (WSS) is a viral infection of penaeid shrimp. The disease is highly lethal and contagious, killing shrimp quickly. Outbreaks of this disease have wiped out the entire populations of many shrimp farms within a few days, in places throughout the world.
White spot syndrome virus (WSSV) is the lone virus of the genus Whispovirus (white spot), which is the only genus in the family Nimaviridae. It is responsible for causing white spot syndrome in a wide range of crustacean hosts.
The disease is caused by a family of related viruses subsumed as the white spot syndrome baculovirus complex and the disease caused by them as white spot syndrome.
History
The first reported epidemic due to this virus is from Taiwan in 1992. Reports of losses due to white spot disease came from China in 1993 where it led to a virtual collapse of the shrimp farming industry. This was followed by outbreaks in Japan and Korea in the same year, Thailand, India and Malaysia in 1994, and by 1996 it had severely affected East Asia and South Asia. In late 1995, it was reported in the United States, 1998 in Central and South America, 1999 in Mexico, in 2000 in the Philippines, and in 2011 in Saudi Arabia.
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This entry incorporates text from “White spot syndrome” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.