Failure to detect <i>Tritrichomonas foetus</i> in a cross-sectional survey in the populations of feral cats and owned outpatient cats on St Kitts, West Indies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Objectives For over two decades, feline trichomonosis caused by Tritrichomonas foetus has been recognized as a large-bowel protozoan disease of the domestic cat. It has a wide distribution, but no reports exist in the Caribbean. The objectives of this study were to detect the presence of T foetus and its prevalence in the domestic cat on St Kitts, West Indies. Methods A cross-sectional study was performed between September 2014 and December 2015. This study recruited 115 feral cats from a trap–neuter–return program and 37 owned cats treated as outpatients at the university veterinary clinic. Fresh feces were inoculated in InPouch culture medium, as per the manufacturer’s instructions. In addition, PCR was performed using primers for T foetus. DNA extraction with amplification using primers of a Felis catus NADH dehydrogenase subunit 6 was used as a housekeeping gene for quality control. Results Only two owned cats had reported diarrhea in the preceding 6 months. None of the 152 samples were positive on InPouch culture microscopic examination. Only 35/69 feral cat fecal DNA samples were positive for the housekeeping gene, of which none tested PCR positive for T foetus. Conclusions and relevance T foetus was not detected by culture and PCR in feral cats and owned cats on St Kitts. A high proportion of PCR inhibitors in the DNA samples using a commercial fecal DNA kit can lead to underestimating the prevalence, which should be taken into consideration when a survey on gastrointestinal pathogens depends exclusively on molecular detection.
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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 | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| 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".