Exposure of the Gulf of St. Lawrence grey seal Halichoerus grypus population to potentially zoonotic infectious agents
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The population of grey seals Halichoerus grypus in Canadian waters is currently used as a commercial source of meat for human consumption. As with domestic livestock, it is important to understand the occurrence in these seals of infectious agents that may be of public health significance and thus ensure appropriate measures are in place to avoid zoonotic transmission. This study examined the prevalence of antibodies against Brucella spp., Erysipelothrix rhusiopathiae, 6 serovars of Leptospira interrogans, and Toxoplasma gondii in 59 grey seals and determined by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) the presence of these potentially zoonotic agents in specific organs and tissues of seropositive animals. The presence of encysted Trichinella spp. larvae was also investigated by digestion of tongue, diaphragm and other muscle samples, but none were detected. Seroprevalence against Brucella spp. and E. rhusiopathiae was low (5 and 3%, respectively). All 59 seals tested had antibodies against L. interrogans, but no carrier of this bacterium was detected by PCR. Seroprevalence against T. gondii was 53%, and DNA of this protozoan was detected by PCR in 11/30 (37%) seropositive animals. Standard sanitary measures mandatory for commercialization of meat products for human consumption should greatly reduce the potential for exposure to these infectious agents. However, special consideration should be given to freezing seal meat for at least 3 d to ensure destruction of tissue cysts of T. gondii.
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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) | 0.000 | 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".