<i>Coxiella burnetii</i> (Q Fever) Seropositivity and Associated Risk Factors in Sheep and Goat Farm Workers in Ontario, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Coxiella burnetii is a zoonotic bacterium that causes Q fever, a potentially severe disease of humans. The objectives of this study were to determine the seroprevalence and risk factors for C. burnetii exposure in sheep and goat farm workers in Ontario, Canada. Between August 2010 and March 2012, 172 farm workers from 78 sheep and goat farms were surveyed regarding demographics, lifestyle, farm practices, and medical history. Sera from these people were collected and analyzed for Q fever titers using the immunofluorescence assay. A mixed multivariable logistic regression model was constructed to identify risk factors for seropositivity. Individual-level and farm-level seroprevalence for C. burnetii were 64.5% (111/172, 95% CI = 57.2-71.4) and 74.4% (58/78, 95% CI = 63.2-83.6), respectively. Farm worker seropositivity was positively associated with an increasing proportion of seropositivity of sheep/goats on farm (odds ratio [OR] = 1.04; 95% CI 1.02-1.07). A higher odds of seropositivity was also observed for people working on dairy goat farms compared to the odds on dairy sheep (OR = 0.04; 95% CI 0.003-0.53) or meat goat (OR = 0.09; 95% CI 0.01-0.67) farms. Coxiella burnetii seropositivity was common in workers on sheep and goat farms in Ontario. Given the significant risk of morbidity associated with this infection, early recognition and treatment of Q fever are important. The risk factors identified provide insight into disease transmission between animals and people, which is particularly important for farmers, researchers, medical doctors, veterinarians, and public health professionals. Physicians practicing in rural areas should consider Q fever infection when patients present with atypical pneumonia and suggestive risk factors.
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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) | 0.001 | 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 | 0.000 |
| 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".