Toxoplasma gondii and related parasites in beluga (Delphinapterus leucas) harvested as country foods by Inuit hunters in Nunavut, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Toxoplasma gondii is a very common zoonotic parasite in humans and animals worldwide. Human seroprevalence is particularly high in some regions of Canada’s North and is thought to be associated with the consumption of traditionally prepared country foods. Many of the wild mammal and bird species consumed as country foods have been reported to be positive for T. gondii by either molecular or serological methods. Belugas (Delphinapterus leucas) are commonly harvested and consumed by Inuit in the Canadian Arctic, but only a few studies have reported the prevalence of T. gondii, or related parasites, in these animals. The objective of this study was to determine the prevalence and genotypes of T. gondii, Sarcocystis spp. and Neospora caninum in available tissues (brain and spleen) of belugas harvested by Inuit hunters in the communities of Sanikiluaq and Arviat, Nunavut, Canada, in order to estimate the potential for foodborne transmission. Based on PCR and DNA sequencing, 31.3% of the 16 belugas tested were positive for T. gondii Type III and 43.8% were positive for Sarcocystis spp. DNA from both of these parasites was detected predominantly in brain tissue. Neospora caninum DNA was not detected in any of the belugas tested. The detection of T. gondii and Sarcocystis spp. DNA in brain and spleen of belugas suggests a potential food safety risk to those consuming these animals raw.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".