Patterns of infection of haemoparasites in the fat sand rat, Psammomys obesus, in Tunisia, and effect on the host
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Two bacterial and one protozoan blood parasite, belonging to the genera Bartonella, Borrelia and Babesia, were studied in a Tunisian population of Psammomys obesus. Seasonal changes in the abundance of the parasites and host were monitored in a longitudinal field survey lasting 17 months. Blood samples collected during eight rodent-trapping sessions, between September 1995 and January 1997, were examined microscopically. Bartonella sp. showed a seasonal pattern, with most transmission occurring in summer and autumn; most rodents (90%) were infected in August-September, when they were at low density and adult. Borrelia sp. showed low prevalences, with few seasonal fluctuations, and Babesia sp. showed an intermediate pattern, differing from one year to another. In the cohort of adult rats, infections with Bartonella sp. and Babesia sp. were less prevalent in winter than in the previous summer. Single and mixed infections were equally prevalent in females and males, and in sexually active and inactive adults. In addition, infection had no apparent effect on the weight of adult P. obesus. The observation that the proportion of erythrocytes infected with Bartonella sp. decreased with increasing host age is probably indicative of some acquired immunity to this micro-organism. The absence of detectable infections with Borrelia sp. in old rats indicates that the prevalence and/or intensity of infection declines with host age or that infected animals die selectively. However, there was no indication that any of these parasites combined sufficient pathogenicity and abundance to have any measurable effect on the rodent population.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".