Surveillance for Aelurostrongylus abstrusus in feral cats on Prince Edward Island reveals low prevalence
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Aelurostrongylus abstrusus is a metastrongyloid nematode of domestic and wild felids with a cosmopolitan distribution. In Canada, confirmed cases have been reported from several provinces, but no published data exist for Prince Edward Island (PEI). This study aimed to determine the occurrence of A. abstrusus in feral cats from PEI. Between January and December 2024, fecal samples were collected opportunistically from feral cats presented for trap-neuter-return (TNR) surgery at the Atlantic Veterinary College. The Baermann technique was used to detect first-stage larvae, which were identified morphologically. Molecular confirmation was performed by PCR amplification and DNA sequencing of the internal transcribed spacer 2 region. Of 378 cats submitted for surgery, 229 (60.6 %) yielded fecal samples suitable for testing. One adult male cat (0.4 %) was positive for A. abstrusus. The larvae exhibited characteristic morphology, and DNA sequencing confirmed 100 % identity with A. abstrusus reference sequences. This represents the first confirmed detection of A. abstrusus in cats from PEI and confirms that A. abstrusus can persist locally, given the presence of suitable gastropod intermediate hosts and known distribution of other gastropod-borne metastrongyloids in the region. To further clarify the epidemiology and potential impact of feline lungworm infection in PEI, additional surveillance, the use of more sensitive diagnostic methods such as serology, and investigation of intermediate hosts are warranted.
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 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) | 0.000 | 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".