I have just read your paper "Co-occurence of viral and bacterial pathogens in disease outbreaks affecting newly cultured sparid fish". In the paper you state that you have identified VHSV from common seabream and white seabream. This is quite interesting as nobody, according to my knowledge, have identified these two fish as host for VHSV before. Have you considered that your isolation may be due to a laboratory contamination? My reason for asking this is the following:

1) You were not able to identify the virus as VHSV using by RT-PCR but only by using a nested version.

2) When sequencing the PCR product you get 100 % identity to an isolate from France from 1971

Furthermore, as VHSV is a listed disease by both EU and the OIE, why was the samples and isolate not sent to the Spanish reference laboratory for fish diseases for confirmation (I assume it was not, since it is not mentioned in the paper)?

I am looking forward to your reply, as this may be the first report of VHSV from these two species.

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