Detection of Venezuelan Equine Encephalitis Virus from Brain Samples of Equines with Encephalitis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Alphavirus species are globally distributed zoonoses primarily transmitted by arthropods. The Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus (VEEV) and Eastern equine encephalitis virus (EEEV) are endemic in Costa Rica. This study aims to detect these viruses in brain samples from equines displaying nervous signs. For this purpose, four published Universal RT-PCR methods were compared. The most sensitive and specific RT-PCR method was used to test a total of 70 brain samples, including 40 from bovines and 30 from equines, all exhibiting nervous signs. In the positive cases, eight different brain regions were extracted and tested using this RT-PCR. Positive cases were confirmed through sequencing. Torii RT-PCR demonstrated the highest sensitivity and specificity for diagnosing VEEV and EEEV/Sind among the four Universal RT-PCR assays. Not all assessed brain regions showed DNA amplification. None of the bovine brains was positive, and out of the 30 equine brain samples, only four tested positive, and sequencing confirmed two of these samples as VEEV subtype IE. Torii RT-PCR successfully detected VEEV in pools of the hippocampus, spinal cord, and basal nuclei, making these brain regions suitable for diagnosing this virus. None of the samples were positive for EEEV or WEEV.
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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) | 0.001 | 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".