Detection of Clostridium difficile in Small and Medium-sized Wild Mammals in Southern Ontario, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We sampled 325 small and medium-sized wild mammals in Ontario, Canada in 2007 and 2010 to determine the prevalence and characteristics of Clostridium difficile in wild mammals living in proximity to captive wildlife and livestock. Clostridium difficile was isolated from five of 109 animals (4.6%) on four of 25 farms (16%), but was not isolated from any of the 216 samples from raccoons (Procyon lotor) living on the grounds of the Toronto Zoo. The positive animals included two raccoons from one beef farm, one raccoon from a different beef farm, one raccoon from a swine farm, and a shrew (Blarina brevicauda) from a dairy farm. None had evidence of gastrointestinal disease. Three of the five isolates were toxinotype variants (II, IV, and XIII) that are rarely identified in humans and domestic animals. The other two were toxinotype 0, a common toxinotype in humans and animals; however, all five isolates were of different ribotypes. None of the recovered ribotypes were recognized as ribotypes present in the authors' reference library of over 3,000 human and domestic animal C. difficile isolates. Neither the public health nor the animal health relevance of these findings is clear. It is not known whether C. difficile is a pathogen of small and medium-sized wild mammals, although the susceptibility of various laboratory species suggests it could cause disease.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 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".