Taggart Patrick L, Stevenson Mark A, Firestone Simon M, McAllister Milton M, Caraguel Charles G B
School of Animal and Veterinary Sciences, The University of Adelaide, Roseworthy, SA, Australia.
Asia-Pacific Centre for Animal Health, Faculty of Veterinary and Agricultural Sciences, Melbourne Veterinary School, The University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia.
Front Vet Sci. 2019 Apr 24;6:127. doi: 10.3389/fvets.2019.00127. eCollection 2019.
Cat-borne parasites and their associated diseases have substantial impacts on human, livestock, and wildlife health worldwide. Despite this, large and detailed datasets that allow researchers to study broad-scale trends in the ecology of cat-borne diseases are either difficult to obtain or non-existent. One condition that is easily detected at slaughter is macroscopic sarcocystosis, a cat-borne parasitosis of sheep (). We conducted a cross-sectional study to describe the geographic distribution of sarcocystosis in sheep throughout South Australia and investigate ecosystem characteristics associated with the presence of disease. Data were obtained from two slaughterhouses which processed 3,865,608 sheep from 4,204 farms across 385,468 km of South Australia's land mass for the period 2007-2017. A Poisson point process model was developed to quantify environmental characteristics associated with higher densities of sarcocystosis-positive farms. Sarcocystosis was highly clustered on a large island off of the Australian coast and the density of sarcocystosis-positive farms increased in areas of low soil pH (intensity ratio: 0.86, 95% CI: 0.78, 0.95) and high clay content. We hypothesize that region was confounded by, and predominately acted as a proxy for, cat density. Our results have broader implications regarding the health, welfare, economic, and conservation impacts of other cat-borne parasitosis, such as toxoplasmosis.
猫传播的寄生虫及其相关疾病对全球人类、家畜和野生动物的健康都有重大影响。尽管如此，能让研究人员研究猫传播疾病生态学广泛趋势的大型详细数据集要么难以获取，要么根本不存在。在屠宰时容易检测到的一种情况是宏观肉孢子虫病，这是一种由猫传播给绵羊的寄生虫病（）。我们进行了一项横断面研究，以描述南澳大利亚州绵羊肉孢子虫病的地理分布，并调查与疾病存在相关的生态系统特征。数据来自两个屠宰场，它们在2007年至2017年期间处理了南澳大利亚州385,468平方公里土地上4,204个农场的3,865,608只绵羊。我们开发了一个泊松点过程模型来量化与肉孢子虫病阳性农场高密度相关的环境特征。肉孢子虫病在澳大利亚海岸外的一个大岛上高度聚集，并且在土壤pH值低（强度比：0.86，95%置信区间：0.78，0.95）和粘土含量高的地区，肉孢子虫病阳性农场的密度增加。我们假设该地区受到猫密度的混淆，并主要作为猫密度的替代指标。我们的研究结果对于其他猫传播的寄生虫病，如弓形虫病，在健康、福利、经济和保护方面的影响具有更广泛的意义。
