Widespread exposure to Francisella tularensis in Rangifer tarandus in Canada and Alaska
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The range of tularemia, a disease caused by the bacterium Francisella tularensis, may expand alongside climate change in the North. Transmission occurs via biting arthropods, contaminated water sources, infected animal tissues and fluids and even aerosolized bacteria. Little research has been published on F. tularensis in northern Canada. We investigated whether Rangifer (caribou and reindeer) in Canada and Alaska are exposed to F. tularensis, as they provide significant cultural and subsistence value. From 2016 to 2020, 336 serum samples were collected from Rangifer across 17 herds, including captive reindeer in Alaska (n = 30) and wild caribou across Canada (n = 306) during collaring or harvesting efforts. Using a microagglutination test, we detected antibodies against F. tularensis in 7% of captive reindeer (CI95 2–21), 6% of migratory tundra caribou (CI95 4–11) and 10% of mountain woodland caribou (CI95 6–17), with the highest seroprevalence observed in animals from Nunavut (17%) and British Columbia, Canada (18%). Ten of the herds (n = 10/17; 59%) had at least one positive animal. Evidence of exposure to F. tularensis indicates that further studies are needed to characterize sources of transmission for Rangifer species and any potential health effects following infection.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 |
| 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".