First case of rabbit haemorrhagic disease in Canada: contaminated flying insect, vs. long‐term infection hypothesis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Following the announcement of the first case of rabbit haemorrhagic disease (RHD) in a pet rabbit, housed indoors in Canada for more than 1 year, I submitted an evidence-based explanation to ProMed explaining how RHD might have caused the death of 'one' of the three pet rabbits. I suggested with supporting evidence, that it may have been persistently infected with rabbit haemorrhagic disease virus (RHDV) which may have reactivated to cause the fatal disease. However, in this issue, Peacock et al. have proposed an alternative 'hypothesis' for the appearance of RHD in the pet rabbit. They hypothesise that a non-identified insect or fomite might have become contaminated by a Chinese strain of RHDV somewhere in the US. This insect/fomite then flew or was windborne, from the US to Canada where it entered the house containing three pet rabbits and infected one of them. RHD is non-endemic and is rarely reported in the US, where it has only been observed in domestic European rabbits, held in rabbitries. My proposal was based on the details provided by ProMed, the veterinary report from Canada, where RHDV has never previously been identified and the epidemiological, ecological and evolutionary history of RHDV which includes serological and phylogenetic evidence that ancestral RHDV lineages circulated before 1984. The flying insect hypothesis of Peacock et al. is based on circumstantial evidence and, I believe, has a lower probability of being correct than my evidence-based long-term infection proposal.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".