DISPATCHES Novel Molecular Type of
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Clostridium difficile causes neonatal enteritis in piglets; strains of PCR ribotype 078 are most commonly identified. We investigated C. difficile prevalence in piglets in Australia and isolated a novel strain with a unique pathogenicity locus. In a mouse infection model, this strain produced more weight loss than did a ribotype 078 strain. Clostridium difficile is the causative agent of severe enteritis (“scouring”) in neonatal piglets 1–7 days of age throughout Canada, the United States, and Europe (1). Although deaths attributable to C. difficile infection (CDI) generally are low because of good stockmanship, piglets that survive CDI remain 10%–15 % underweight on average and take additional time to wean (2). Colonization frequency of C. difficile in scouring piglets is as high as 52%; this rate declines to 4 % by 2 months of age (3). C. difficile is also commonly found in feces from apparently healthy piglets, which contributes to environmental contamination. Widespread air and surface contamination of the piggery environment with C. difficile, presumably in the form of long-surviving spores, may play a role in the epidemiology of CDI in pigs and subsequent community-acquired infection in humans (4). In Europe and the United States, the genotypes of C. difficile isolates that cause disease in humans and production animals overlap, particularly PCR ribotype 078, which predominates in pigs worldwide. This ribotype is increasing in prevalence and associated with severe communityacquired CDI in humans geographically located near pig farms (5). C. difficile has also been found in retail food, including meat products, seafood, and vegetables (6).
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.025 | 0.026 |
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".