Klossiella equi, an underreported parasite of equids in the Americas
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Klossiella equi Baumann, 1946 (Apicomplexa: Coccidia) is a globally distributed adeleorinid parasite that infects the kidneys of equid hosts. Considered an uncommon parasite, when K. equi is detected, it is typically an incidental finding during histologic examination of the kidneys as part of routine necropsy. In the present study, kidney was collected opportunistically from 3 different equine populations: 1) routine necropsies at the Ontario Veterinary College (OVC; n = 48); 2) natural mortalities from the Sable Island wild horse herd (n = 25); and 3) routine necropsies of animals from University of Kentucky parasitological research herds (mares n = 3, foals n = 16). A Polymerase Chain Reaction-based method targeting a 575 base pair region of the K. equi mitochondrial genome was developed and applied to DNA extracted from kidney to detect K. equi infections. Overall prevalence was 45% (41/92); no animal < 10 months-of-age was infected. Among animals ≥ 1 year-of-age, prevalence was 58% (40/67) and high at all locations: OVC prevalence of 50% (24/48); Sable Island prevalence of 56% (14/25); and 100% of the mares (3/3) from Kentucky were infected. Twenty of the K. equi-positive cases necropsied at OVC also had routine histological evaluation that failed to detect any K. equi infections. A DNA sample from sporocysts shed in urine by an Argentinian horse was used for sequenced-based genotyping; the resulting sequence matched the K. equi reference (MH203050) at 100% over 957 base pairs. These data confirm that K. equi is grossly underreported and histological evaluation is an insensitive method of detection.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".