Nido is actually a long time virus in ball pythons. It has a higher mortality rate in GTPs however but can stay dormant for years in them while remaining asymptomatic. Currently they are trying to isolate several different genetic strains in GTPs. Due to cross breeding and breeding stock sharing without enough understanding to quarantine properly, the US breeding stock of GTPs is pretty high in the probability of nidovirus and also due to the hesitance of breeders to step forward and admit infection or being just plain unaware, it is still unclear the percent of stock that is infected.
Nido symptoms are pneumonia like complications from respiratory infections and in GTPs will overwhelm they ability to fight it off when it becomes symptomatic and they will perish from pneumonia complications for the RI symptoms of nido.
In short the market got flooded by inexperienced breeders with a ton of money and a few experienced breeders with lapses in quarantine practices and now we are facing a possible epidemic in GTP breeding stock.
I do not know the actual mortality rate in BPs as either it is low, they are asymptomatic like boas are with IBD or breeders are either ignorant on the spread of it or a not having it diagnosed (requires lab genetic RNA sequencing to confirm) properly and it is being mislabeled as RI in mortality cases.
While we see on this forum a few new owners of BPs have wasting with some underfed and poor will to live specimens, the occurrence of RI in BPs seems to either tapered off or lowered to the point where they are not succumbing to the symptoms associated with nido (RI with no response to antibiotics), are asymptomatic of any disease or simply the spread of nido in BP have dwindled.
One problem is due to the asymptomatic nature in GTP and if possible in ball pythons, simple quarantine procedures may not be sufficient as the only way to rule out is to get lab testing done to confirm the presence of the virus in a breeding stock.
Here is the current thread about the progress of isolating the virus strains and finding out more about it in GTPs.
https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/more...es-t26039.html
Here is the CDC report from 2014 on BP nido virus from the 1990s.
I actually was reading up on this for months before thinking on getting a GTP so forgive me if I sound like I am regurgitating information I found online.
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