Prevalence of Q fever in domestic animals with reproductive disorders

Seroscreening of lactating cattle for coxiellosis by TRANS-PCR and commercial ELISA in Kerala, India

“…(Das et al, 2014). However, it was well below the range of 12.78 to 29.9% reported in the cattle from northern parts of country by other workers (Joshi et al, 1978;Vaidya et al, 2010), which may be attributed to the investigation of animals at household level, with not more than 3 cattle per house examined in the present study. On contrary, studies involving large cattle herd size with intensive farming practices were found to have a positive association with C. burnetii infection (McCaughey et al, 2010;Ryan et al, 2011;Paul et al, 2012;Agger & Paul, 2014;Boroduske et al, 2017).…”

“…In present study, a positive correlation was observed between sero-positivity and history of reproductive disorders in lactating cattle. These observations draw strength from the earlier studies wherein the pathogen has been isolated from the samples of blood (Das et al, 2014) and genital organs (Ho et al, 1995;Vaidya et al, 2010) of bovines with the history of reproductive disorders. However, the small sample size and non-consideration of other causal factors associated with reproductive disorders in our study limits us to arrive at any definitive conclusion, especially in the absence of the clear demonstration of any effect of C. burnetii infection (GarciaIspierto et al, 2014) or seropositivity and shedding (Freick et al, 2017) on the parameters of reproduction in a dairy herd.…”

“…However, frequent outbreaks of livestock diseases including zoonoses coupled with the constraints related to feeding, breeding, health and management remains a major hurdle in harnessing the full production potential of livestock. In this context, role and status of reservoirs of coxiellosis among ruminants, which are considered to serve as a main source for this largely masked and grossly underreported zoonosis, remains rather unexplored barring a few studies in India (Vaidya et al, 2010;Malik et al, 2013;Stephen et al, 2014;Mohan et al, 2017).…”

“…The sensitivity of the ELISA has been estimated to be 95.2% for the detection of IgG in C. burnetii infection (WegdamBlans et al, 2012), whereas, in other study the specificity of the ELISA has been estimated to 98.44% (Vaidya et al, 2010). However, the serological tests have proven to be inadequate for detecting Q fever infections in the very early phase of the disease, when antibody levels are low or developing; hence, the PCR for nucleic acid detection is indispensable for early diagnosis of acute Q fever (Schneeberger et al, 2010), with the most preferred target as the transposable repetitive insertion element sequence IS1111 of C. burnetii, which is present in about 20 copies in the C. burnetii Nine Mile genome (Denison et al, 2007).…”

“…However, the epidemiological studies on Q fever in India in general are very limited, while the research on associated risk factors and disease dynamic trends in particular are almost negligible, which can be primarily attributed to the limited diagnostic capacities and gross neglect of the disease on account of lack of the clinical curiosity among the physicians and veterinary professionals (Vaidya et al, 2010;Malik et al, 2013;Stephen et al, 2014;Mohan et al, 2017). In fact, during the past 60 years only about 25 publications on human and animal Q fever from India are available in international databases , including the two recent reports on bovine coxiellosis from northern part of India (Vaidya et al, 2010;Das et al, 2014), and a sole report on coxiellosis in ovines (Stephen et al, 2014) from southern part of India. However, no systematic study on bovine coxiellosis from southern part of India has been documented so far.…”