Campylobacter jejuni, coli, and lari prevalence in wild birds and backyard poultry

Date
2012
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
Campylobacter jejuni is responsible for the majority of bacterial foodborne gastroenteritis in the United States (Thomas, 1988; Abulreesh et al., 2006), yet due to the generalized symptoms and overall feelings of malaise, Campylobacter infections often go undiagnosed and unreported. Most food poisoning occurs due to the consumption of undercooked poultry meat; however little research has been conducted on other avian species that have the potential for transmitting the bacterium, especially in the US. Understanding the prevalence of these bacterial pathogens in wild birds may serve as a useful model for examining the spread of disease organisms (Benskin et al., 2009). The overall prevalence of Campylobacter spp. was 11.4 % for all wild birds in this study and 11.1 % for backyard poultry. Samples were heterogeneous in terms of prevalence at all levels, including order, family, genus, and species, ranging from 0 to 43.1 %. C. jejuni was the most prevalent species of Campylobacter present, while C. coli and C. lari prevalence estimates were low (10.1 %, 1.4 %, 0.3 %, respectively for wild birds). Results from culturing methods indicate that 30 % of Snow Geese and 6 % of Canada Geese were positive for Campylobacter spp. (n = 111, n = 274, respectively). Of several species in the Laridae family, 12 % (n = 127) were positive for Campylobacter spp., while Ruddy Turnstones had a prevalence of 43 % (n = 65), Sanderling 4 % (n = 26), and Semipalmated Sandpipers 26 % (n = 62). Overall, I detected Campylobacter spp. in 16.8 % of wild bird samples (n = 665) through culturing. Characteristic human disease clonal complexes and sequence types were isolated from all wild bird samples through MLST-PCR, but a significant amount of samples also had not yet had a sequence type assigned to them, including the backyard poultry samples, and will be submitted to the Campylobacter Multi Locus Sequence Typing website (http://pubmlst.org/Campylobacter/) (Jolley and Maiden, 2010). Wild birds are sharing an increasing amount of habitat with humans as more of the landscape becomes fragmented and developed for human needs. Wild birds will remain an important aspect of public health due to their ability to carry emerging zoonotic pathogens or aiding in the dispersal of arthropod vectors (Reed et al., 2003). Although wild birds still have the potential to spread disease organisms such as Campylobacter, humans are also leaking pathogens into the environment that in turn have the potential for infecting wild bird populations. Backyard poultry overall had a low prevalence of Campylobacter, possibly indicating lower shedding rates due to reduced stress as compared to commercial poultry. As basic information such as prevalence is still missing from a great majority of wild birds in the US, this study provides further insight into Campylobacter epidemiology, host preference, and strain characterization of C. jejuni.
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