The Emergence of <i>Cryptococcus gattii</i> Infections on Vancouver Island and Expansion in the Pacific Northwest
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This chapter outlines issues that were quickly explored, starting with the realization in 2001 that Vancouver Island was a hot spot for a pathogen not previously described as endemic and not restricted to tropical and subtropical climates. The picture of the outbreak that has developed has implications for global travel, climate change, land use patterns, and environmental colonization. Importantly, cryptococcosis caused by Cryptococcus gattii now serves as an excellent illustration of the impact of pathogen spread into a clement ecological niche, in this case, one that happened to be in a major population center of western Canada and the Pacific Northwest. Symptoms and clinicopathological changes in animals on Vancouver Island were consistent with disease reported elsewhere. The most common primary system involved was respiratory, followed by the central nervous system (CNS), in both cats and dogs. Animal cryptococcosis due to C. gattii is a nonregulated disease in Canada. Molecular typing of C. gattii environmental isolates from Vancouver Island using PCR fingerprinting and/or restriction fragment length polymorphism methodologies revealed that the majority of isolates belonged to the VGII molecular type and a small number belonged to the VGI molecular type. A number of solid culture media, biochemical tests, and stains can confirm the diagnosis of Cryptococcus to the genus level. Ecological niche modeling was employed to identify geographical areas in British Columbia with suitable environmental conditions to support the permanent colonization of C. gattii in the environment.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".