Longitudinal study of Clostridium difficile shedding in raccoons on swine farms and conservation areas in Ontario, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Clostridium difficile is an important enteropathogen affecting humans, domestic animals, and wildlife. The objectives of this study were to 1) compare the prevalence and characteristics of C. difficile isolated from the feces of raccoons trapped on swine farms and conservation sites, and 2) investigate the role of raccoons as potential reservoirs for host-adapted strains of C. difficile using a longitudinal study. Fecal swabs were collected from raccoons at 5 conservation sites and 5 swine farms, once every five weeks, from May to November, 2012. RESULTS: Clostridium difficile was isolated from 9 % (38/444) of samples, from 12 % (37/302) of raccoons, from all 10 sites. A total of 19 different ribotypes were identified, including 5 ribotypes that matched recognized international designations and which are also found in humans (001, 014, 056, 078, and 103). Location type (farm or conservation area) was not associated with C. difficile status (P = 0.448) but only 3 ribotypes (014, 056, and 078) were found in both location types. The prevalence of ribotype 078 was significantly higher on farms (4 %; 9/220) compared to conservation sites (1 %; 2/225) (P = 0.034). Only one of 108 raccoons caught in multiple sessions was positive on more than one occasion. CONCLUSIONS: We found no evidence to support the hypothesis that raccoons harbour host-adapted strains of C. difficile; rather, it appears that raccoons transiently acquire C. difficile from the environment. Raccoons are unlikely to be maintaining C. difficile, but because we detected C. difficile strains that have the potential to cause illness in humans and livestock, and because raccoons can move relatively large distances, they may play a role in the dissemination of pathogenic ribotypes of C. difficile throughout the environment.
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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".