scholarly journals Health evaluation of African penguins (Spheniscus demersus) in southern Africa

2016 ◽  
Vol 83 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nola J. Parsons ◽  
Tertius A. Gous ◽  
Adam M. Schaefer ◽  
Ralph E.T. Vanstreels
Keyword(s):  
Disease Virus ◽  
Disease Surveillance ◽  
Direct Detection ◽  
Health Assessment ◽  
Hepatic Function ◽  
Rehabilitation Centre ◽  
Infectious Laryngotracheitis Virus ◽  
Apparent Prevalence ◽  
In The Wild ◽  
Spheniscus Demersus

The African penguin (Spheniscus demersus) is an endangered seabird that breeds along the coast of Namibia and South Africa, and disease surveillance was identified as a priority for its conservation. Aiming for the establishment of baseline data on the presence of potential pathogens in this species, a comprehensive health assessment (blood smear examination, haematology, biochemistry and serology) was conducted on samples obtained from 578 African penguins at 11 breeding colonies and a rehabilitation centre. There were 68 penguins that were seropositive for at least one of seven pathogens tested: avian encephalomyelitis virus, avian infectious bronchitis virus, avian reovirus, infectious bursal disease virus, Newcastle disease virus, Mycoplasma gallisepticum and Mycoplasma synoviae. All samples were seronegative for avian influenza virus subtypes H5 and H7 and infectious laryngotracheitis virus. The apparent prevalence of Babesia sp. and Borrelia sp. in blood smears was consistent with previous studies. Babesia-infected individuals had a regenerative response of the erythrocytic lineage, an active inflammatory response and hepatic function impairment. These findings indicate that African penguins may be exposed to conservation-significant pathogens in the wild and encourage further studies aiming for the direct detection and/or isolation of these microorganisms.

Listen2Cough

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Xuhai Xu ◽  
Ebrahim Nemati ◽  
Korosh Vatanparvar ◽  
Viswam Nathan ◽  
Tousif Ahmed ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Health Assessment ◽  
Ground Truth ◽  
Health Condition ◽  
Fine Tuning ◽  
Detection Model ◽  
Assessment Tasks ◽  
Augmentation Techniques ◽  
In The Wild ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Lung Health

The prevalence of ubiquitous computing enables new opportunities for lung health monitoring and assessment. In the past few years, there have been extensive studies on cough detection using passively sensed audio signals. However, the generalizability of a cough detection model when applied to external datasets, especially in real-world implementation, is questionable and not explored adequately. Beyond detecting coughs, researchers have looked into how cough sounds can be used in assessing lung health. However, due to the challenges in collecting both cough sounds and lung health condition ground truth, previous studies have been hindered by the limited datasets. In this paper, we propose Listen2Cough to address these gaps. We first build an end-to-end deep learning architecture using public cough sound datasets to detect coughs within raw audio recordings. We employ a pre-trained MobileNet and integrate a number of augmentation techniques to improve the generalizability of our model. Without additional fine-tuning, our model is able to achieve an F1 score of 0.948 when tested against a new clean dataset, and 0.884 on another in-the-wild noisy dataset, leading to an advantage of 5.8% and 8.4% on average over the best baseline model, respectively. Then, to mitigate the issue of limited lung health data, we propose to transform the cough detection task to lung health assessment tasks so that the rich cough data can be leveraged. Our hypothesis is that these tasks extract and utilize similar effective representation from cough sounds. We embed the cough detection model into a multi-instance learning framework with the attention mechanism and further tune the model for lung health assessment tasks. Our final model achieves an F1-score of 0.912 on healthy v.s. unhealthy, 0.870 on obstructive v.s. non-obstructive, and 0.813 on COPD v.s. asthma classification, outperforming the baseline by 10.7%, 6.3%, and 3.7%, respectively. Moreover, the weight value in the attention layer can be used to identify important coughs highly correlated with lung health, which can potentially provide interpretability for expert diagnosis in the future.

scholarly journals A non-invasive method to assess environmental contamination with avian pathogens: beak and feather disease virus (BFDV) detection in nest boxes

PeerJ ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. e9211
Author(s):  
Johanne M. Martens ◽  
Helena S. Stokes ◽  
Mathew L. Berg ◽  
Ken Walder ◽  
Shane R. Raidal ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Disease Virus ◽  
Indirect Transmission ◽  
Bird Populations ◽  
Non Invasive ◽  
Nest Sites ◽  
Nest Boxes ◽  
In The Wild ◽  
Invasive Method ◽  
Wildlife Pathogens ◽  
Feather Disease Virus

Indirect transmission of pathogens can pose major risks to wildlife, yet the presence and persistence of wildlife pathogens in the environment has been little studied. Beak and feather disease virus (BFDV) is of global conservation concern: it can infect all members of the Psittaciformes, one of the most threatened bird orders, with infection often being lethal. Indirect transmission of BFDV through contaminated nest hollows has been proposed as a major infection source. However, data on whether and for how long nest sites in the wild remain contaminated have been absent. We determined the BFDV status of birds (parents and nestlings) for 82 nests of Crimson Rosellas, Platycercus elegans and Eastern Rosellas, Platycercus eximius. In 11 of these nests (13.4%, 95% confidence interval 6.9–22.7), we found an infected parent or nestling. Using nest swabs, we then compared BFDV presence at three points in time (before, during and after breeding) in three groups of nest boxes. These were nest boxes occupied by infected birds, and two control groups (nest boxes occupied by uninfected birds, and unoccupied nest boxes). Detection of BFDV on nest swabs was strongly associated with the infection status of parents in each nest box and with the timing of breeding. During breeding, boxes occupied by BFDV-positive birds were significantly more likely to have BFDV-positive nest swabs than boxes occupied by BFDV-negative birds; nest swabs tested BFDV-positive in 80% (28.4–99.5) of nests with parental antigen excretion, 66.7% (9.4–99.2) of nests occupied by parents with BFDV-positive cloacal swabs and 66.7% (22.3–95.7) of nests occupied by parents with BFDV–positive blood. 0% (0–52.2) of nests with BFDV–positive nestlings had BFDV–positive nest swabs. Across all boxes occupied by BFDV-positive birds (parents or nestlings), no nest swabs were BFDV–positive before breeding, 36.4% (95% CI 10.9–69.2) were positive during breeding and 9.1% (0.2–41.3) remained positive after breeding. BFDV was present on nest swabs for up to 3.7 months. Our study provides novel insights into the potential role of nest cavities and other fomites in indirect transmission of BFDV, and possibly other pathogens, and offers a non-invasive method for surveillance of pathogens in wild bird populations.

scholarly journals Inter-laboratory comparison of 2 ELISA kits used for foot-and-mouth disease virus nonstructural protein serology

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (6) ◽  
pp. 933-937
Author(s):  
Clare F. J. Browning ◽  
Antonello Di Nardo ◽  
Lissie Henry ◽  
Tim Pollard ◽  
Lynne Hendry ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Disease Virus ◽  
Disease Surveillance ◽  
Nonstructural Protein ◽  
Foot And Mouth Disease ◽  
Screen Test ◽  
Mouth Disease ◽  
Nonstructural Proteins ◽  
Mouth Disease Virus ◽  
Foot And Mouth ◽  
Thermo Fisher Scientific

Serologic assays used to detect antibodies to nonstructural proteins (NSPs) of foot-and-mouth disease virus (FMDV) are used for disease surveillance in endemic countries, and are essential to providing evidence for freedom of the disease with or without vaccination and to recover the free status of a country after an outbreak. In a 5-site inter-laboratory study, we compared the performance of 2 commercial NSP ELISA kits (ID Screen FMD NSP ELISA single day [short] and overnight protocols, ID.Vet; PrioCHECK FMDV NS antibody ELISA, Thermo Fisher Scientific). The overall concordance between the PrioCHECK and ID Screen test was 93.8% (95% CI: 92.0–95.2%) and 94.8% (95% CI: 93.1–96.1%) for the overnight and short ID Screen incubation protocols, respectively. Our results indicate that the assays (including the 2 different formats of the ID Screen test) can be used interchangeably in post-outbreak serosurveillance.

scholarly journals Direct detection and characterization of foot-and-mouth disease virus in East Africa using a field-ready real-time PCR platform

2017 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 221-231 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. L. A. Howson ◽  
B. Armson ◽  
N. A. Lyons ◽  
E. Chepkwony ◽  
C. J. Kasanga ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Real Time ◽  
East Africa ◽  
Disease Virus ◽  
Real Time Pcr ◽  
Direct Detection ◽  
Foot And Mouth Disease ◽  
Mouth Disease ◽  
Mouth Disease Virus ◽  
Foot And Mouth

A long-term serological survey on Aujeszky's disease virus infections in wild boar in East Germany

2011 ◽  
Vol 140 (2) ◽  
pp. 348-358 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. PANNWITZ ◽  
C. FREULING ◽  
N. DENZIN ◽  
U. SCHAARSCHMIDT ◽  
H. NIEPER ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Wild Boar ◽  
Disease Virus ◽  
East Germany ◽  
Wild Boar Population ◽  
Entire Study ◽  
Domestic Pigs ◽  
Aujeszky's Disease ◽  
Aujeszky’S Disease ◽  
Aujeszky’S Disease Virus ◽  
In The Wild

SUMMARYBetween 1985 and 2008, a total of 102 387 wild boar sera originating from Eastern Germany covering an area of 108 589 km2 were tested for the presence of Aujeszky's disease virus (ADV)-specific antibodies. From 1985 until 1991 and from 1992 until 2008, wild boar sera were exclusively investigated using either conventional seroneutralization assays (n=39 621) or commercial gB and full antigen ELISAs (n=62 766), respectively. Spatial-temporal analysis revealed an increasing ADV seroprevalence from 0·4% to 15·9%, on average, during the 24-year observation period that went along with a continuous spread of the infection in a western direction. During 2006 and 2008, 18% of the 66 affected districts had ADV seroprevalences >30%. There was a significant correlation between ADV seroprevalence and the hunting index of population density (HIPD) of wild boar in the entire study area, although this did not hold true for some regions. Seroprevalences did not differ between sexes but were age-dependent. East Germany has been officially free of Aujeszky's disease (pseudorabies) in domestic pigs since 1985. Although a risk for domestic pigs cannot be completely ruled out, experience has shown that ADV in domestic pigs could be eliminated although the virus was present in the wild boar population. Despite increasing ADV seroprevalence in the East German wild boar population no spillover infections from wild boar to domestic pigs have been reported. To further trace ADV infections in the wild boar population in Germany, a nationwide serological monitoring programme should be implemented.

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