Prevalence of heartworm infection in the feral cat population of Grand Cayman
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: The aim of this study was to determine the presence and prevalence of heartworm infection in the feral cat population of Grand Cayman. METHODS: During the study period, feral cats were routinely trapped and euthanized for population control by the municipal animal shelter. Cats older than 6 months of age were obtained for post-mortem examination shortly after euthanasia. The heart, lungs, pulmonary vasculature, thoracic and abdominal cavities were examined for the presence, location and number of mature heartworms. Sections of caudal lung were evaluated histologically and serologic tests were performed to screen for additional evidence of heartworm exposure. RESULTS: Mature heartworms were identified in the pulmonary vasculature of 4/36 cats (11.1%). An additional nine cats showed histopathologic changes in the lungs consistent with heartworm exposure, and one cat had a positive antibody test. CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE: The results indicate a minimum heartworm prevalence of 11.1% within this population of feral cats, consistent with published necropsy reports from other endemic localities. Considering the histopathologic changes observed in this group, the true prevalence is likely higher and underscores the importance of heartworm prevention for the companion cat population of the island.
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 | 0.000 | 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".