Clostridium difficile associated enterocolitis in adult horses and foals
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This research investigated the role of the anaerobic bacterium ' Clostridium difficile' in equine enterocolitis. The objectives of this study were to compare the prevalence of the isolation of 'Clostridium difficile' and detection of 'C. difficile' toxins A and/or B from diarrheic adult horses and foals versus those with normal feces. 'Clostridium difficile' was isolated from 7/55 diarrheic adult horses (13%) versus 1/255 adult horses with normal feces (0.4%) (p < 0.001). 'Clostridium difficile' toxins were present in the feces of 12/55 diarrheic adults (22%) versus 1/83 adults with normal feces (1.2%) (p < 0.001). Two culture positive/toxin negative and 7 culture negative/toxin positive cases were encountered. 'Clostridium difficile' was isolated from 11/31 diarrheic foals (35%) versus 0/40 foals with normal feces (p < 0.001). 'Clostridium difficile' toxins were detected in the feces 5/30 diarrheic foals (17%) and 0/21 normal foals (p < 0.05). Fecal samples from 8 foals were culture positive/toxin negative and 2 were culture negative/toxin positive. To clarify the significance of culture positive/toxin negative and culture negative/toxin positive cases, the survival of 'C. difficile' and persistence of 'C. difficile' toxins were studied. The recovery of 'C. difficile' in aerobically stored feces decreased dramatically over the first 72 hours at which point only 26% of samples yielded growth. This was determined to be due to poor aerotolerance because ' C. difficile' persisted in fecal samples stored anaerobically. In contrast, 'Clostridium difficile' toxins were determined to be immunologically stable in equine feces stored under aerobic conditions. 'Clostridium difficile' spores were isolated from 24/381 sites within the Ontario Veterinary College Veterinary Teaching Hospital including 9/202 (4.5%) sites in the large animal clinic, 13/160 (8.1%) sites in the small animal clinic and 2/10 (20%) sites in other areas. Forty-one/43 equine and environmental 'C. difficile' isolates were resistant to bacitracin and cefotaxime. All isolates were sensitive to vancomycin and metronidazole. Variable resistance was present against penicillin G, tetracycline, erythromycin and trimethoprim-sulfa. This study provides further information into the role of 'C. difficile ' in sporadic and nosocomial enterocolitis in adult horses and foals. However, a great deal of future study is required to better understand the role of this pathogen in equine disease.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| 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".