Experimental Clostridium difficile Enterocolitis in Foals
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Despite empirical clinical association of infection with Clostridium difficile with colitis in horses, a causal link has not been confirmed. The objective of this study was to develop a model of C difficile–associated diarrhea in foals with normal transfer of passive immunity. Nine 1-day-old pony foals were inoculated intragastrically with spores or vegetative cells of C difficile. Five foals were challenged with spores, with 2 receiving 105 colony-forming units (CFUs) and concurrently 3 receiving 107 CFUs once daily for 3 days. Clindamycin was administered orally to disrupt gastrointestinal flora. A further 4 foals were challenged by orogastric administration of 1010 CFUs of vegetative cells once daily for 3 days or until diarrhea developed. This group did not receive clindamycin. Spore and vegetative cell preparations were negative for toxins of C difficile and common enteropathogens. Clinical signs varied from mild abdominal discomfort and pasty feces to colic and watery diarrhea in 8 of 9 foals. Four of 5 foals challenged with spores developed mild diarrhea, whereas all foals challenged with vegetative cells developed moderate to severe diarrhea. C difficile was isolated from feces of all foals between 24 and 72 hours after inoculation and toxins A or B or both were detected in the feces of all foals by an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. We concluded that spores and vegetative cells of C difficile are capable of colonizing the gastrointestinal tract, producing toxins, and inducing clinical signs similar to those encountered in naturally occurring cases. This study fulfilled Koch's postulates for C difficile–associated diarrhea in foals and provides a model for consistent reproduction of the disease for future studies.
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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 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) | 0.001 | 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".