Diagnosis of orf virus infection in humans by the polymerase chain reaction.

The orf virus is the causal agent of contagious ecthyma in goats and sheep. The infection can be transmitted to humans and represents a typical example of occupational zoonosis. In Italy the real incidence of human infection remains uncertain because the disease is rarely reported or diagnosed. In this paper we report a human orf virus infection and the laboratory methods to diagnosed it. We demonstrated a genomic identity between conserved and variable regions of the genome of the viral strains isolated from the human patient and the sheep confirming that there is not a specific clone infecting humans rather than animals.