SEROLOGICAL AND MOLECULAR EVALUATION OF TISSUE-DWELLING PARASITES (SARCOCYSTIDAE) IN HARVESTED WILDLIFE IN THE CANADIAN ARCTIC
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Country foods are integral to Inuit cultural identity and food security. However, the harvest and consumption of wildlife pose risks of transmission of zoonotic parasites, such as Toxoplasma gondii, of concern for Inuit communities in the Canadian Arctic. The main aim of this thesis was to determine seroprevalence and tissue prevalence of Toxoplasma gondii and related tissue-dwelling coccidian parasites in harvested wildlife in the Canadian Arctic. To address these objectives, I used multiple serological techniques to detect antibodies against parasites and molecular approaches to detect DNA in tissue samples. The overall seroprevalence for T. gondii in caribou from Nunavik, Québec was 18% (95% CI: 11.5-28%) and 1% (95% CI: 0.2-4.6%) in belugas from the Eastern Beaufort Sea, Northwest Territories. On magnetic capture DNA extraction and qPCR for T. gondii in heart and brain of caribou and belugas, DNA of T. gondii was detected in only one beluga heart. This suggests that the risk of zoonotic transmission of T. gondii from harvesting and consuming caribou and belugas is low, but not zero. Antibodies to Neospora caninum were detected in 5% (95% CI: 0.6-8%) and DNA was detected in tissues of 1.5% (95% CI: 0.3-7.9%) of caribou harvested in Nunavik. Furthermore, DNA of Sarcocystis spp. was detected in both heart and skeletal muscle from caribou (85%, 95% CI: 76.4-91.2%), and muscle of beluga (59%, 95% CI: 47.9-69.2%). Phylogenetic analysis of Sarcocystis spp. from caribou were linked to terrestrial canids, and were similar to sequences reported in Europe, possibly reflecting translocations of Rangifer sp. In contrast, Sarcocystis sp. from belugas indicated a potential marine life cycle. Finally, I compared in-house ELISAs with a commercial ELISA kit in previously tested polar bear samples for T. gondii to optimize these tests in wildlife, emphasizing the need for improved testing protocols, known controls, and statistical approaches to test comparison when gold standards are lacking. In conclusion, this thesis contributes to our understanding of tissue-dwelling coccidian parasites in wildlife harvested for human consumption, offers insights into arctic trophic dynamics, and highlights the importance of a One Health concept for human and animal health in the Canadian North.
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 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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 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".