High sero-prevalence of caseous lymphadenitis identified in slaughterhouse samples as a consequence of deficiencies in sheep farm management in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Caseous lymphadenitis (CLA), caused by <it>Corynebacterium pseudotuberculosis</it>, is one of the most important diseases of sheep and goats, causing considerable economic losses for herd owners.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We assessed the seroprevalence of infection with <it>C. pseudotuberculosis </it>in 805 sheep from 23 sheep farms that supply slaughterhouses in the state of Minas Gerais; we also analyzed management practices that could be associated with CLA occurrence, used on these and nearby farms that also supplied animals to the slaughterhouse (n = 60). The serum samples for assaying CLA infection were taken at the slaughterhouse. Frequency of infection with <it>C. pseudotuberculosis </it>was estimated at 43.7%, and farm frequency was estimated at 100%. Management practices were analyzed through a questionnaire. All farmers (60/60) had extensive/semi-extensive rearing system; 70.0% (42/60) identified sheep individually; 11.7% (7/60) had periodical technical assistance; 41.7% (25/60) disinfected the facilities; 86.7% (52/60) used barbed wire fences and did not implement adequate CLA control measures; only 11.7% (7/60) of breeders reported vaccination against <it>C. pseudotuberculosis</it>; 13.3% (8/60) took note of animals with clinical signs of CLA; 1.7% (1/60) opened and sanitized abscesses, and isolated the infected animals; 10.0% (6/60) knew the zoonotic potential of this disease and 1.7% (1/60) of the farmers culled animals in case of recurrence of abscesses.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>It can be concluded that <it>C. pseudotuberculosis </it>infection is widely spread in sheep flocks in Minas Gerais state in Brazil and that there is a lack of good management measures and vaccination, allowing transmission of this infectious agent throughout the production network.</p

Phylogenetic Group of Escherichia coli

The aim of the study was to determine the phylogenetic groups of E. coli strains isolated from seemingly healthy broiler and broiler condemned suspected of colibacillosis in a Brazilian slaughterhouse. Samples from respiratory tract and edible giblets (liver and heart) of broilers with and without macroscopic lesions of colibacillosis were collected at slaughter. There were 84 strains isolated from broilers condemned of which 11 were obtained from swabs of the heart, 7 from the liver, and 66 from the respiratory tract. Of the 53 E. coli strains isolated from broilers not condemned, 5 were isolated from the heart, 4 from the liver, and 44 from the respiratory tract. E coli strains were tested via PCR for phylogenetic groups A, B1, B2, C, D, E, and F. Phylogroups A and B1 were the most common phylogroups of E. coli obtained from healthy and sick-appearing broiler carcasses. The results of the study showed that phylogroups B2 and E were associated with the heart samples and phylogroup A was associated with respiratory tract samples, phylogroup B1 with not condemned carcass, and phylogroup D with liver samples

Prevalence of antibodies against caseous lymphadenitis in commercial sheep herds in the Federal District, Brazil

O objetivo deste trabalho foi determinar a prevalência de anticorpos contra linfadenite caseosa (LC) em rebanhos ovinos comerciais do Distrito Federal (DF). Foram coletadas 1.028 amostras de soro entre março e junho de 2004, de todas as propriedades (32) do Distrito Federal com pelo menos 20 fêmeas adultas no rebanho. A soroprevalência da linfadenite caseosa foi determinada por ELISA com proteínas secretadas de Corynebacterium pseudotuberculosis. Cinquenta por cento das 32 propriedades apresentaram pelo menos um animal soropositivo para o LC e a prevalência real para animais foi de 44,0% (IC 95: 41,0; 47,0), portanto, esses dados sugerem que a LC está presente em rebanhos ovinos comerciais no Distrito Federal.The objective of this study was to determinate the seroprevalence of caseous lymphadenitis (CL) in commercial sheep herds in the Federal District, Brazil. One thousand and twenty-eight serum samples were collected, between March and June 2004, from all the properties (32) with at least 20 adult females in the flock. The seroprevalence of caseous lymphadenitis was determined by ELISA with secreted proteins of Corynebacterium pseudotuberculosis. The real prevalence value for the animals was 44.0% (CI 95: 41.0; 47.0), and 50.0% of the 32 herds had at least one animal seropositive for CL. Therefore, these data show that CL is fairly widespread in commercial flocks of sheep in the Federal District

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe