New insights on the infection of pathogenic Leptospira species in American mink ( Neovison vison ) in southern Chile
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New insights on the infection of pathogenic Leptospira species in American mink (Neovison vison) in southern Chile Miguel Angel Salgado Alfaro 1 & Eduardo Raffo 2 & María Isabel Bustos 1 & Camilo Tomckowiack 1 & Carlos Tejeda 1 & Luis Collado 3 & Gonzalo Medina-Vogel 4 Received: 8 April 2020 / Accepted: 29 October 2020 # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Leptospirosis is a zoonosis of global distribution, caused by the infection of pathogenic Leptospira, a group of bacteria capable of infecting both domestic and wild animals. Mink (Neovison vison) in southern Chile is recognized as a wild and synanthropic rodent predator (among various other prey), and Leptospira infection in them can be acquired through contact with the pathogen in the environment or by eating infected prey. Thus, the aim of this study was to provide more specifics regarding the source of the infection for the American mink under the conditions of Southern Chile. Minks were captured in the Los Ríos region, southern Chile, in an area with well-developed dairy farming. Two areas were selected for mink trapping, one with a high degree of dairy farming and a second with a low degree of dairy farming. Within them, 16 study sites were visited, and 45 American mink were trapped and euthanized to obtain kidney tissue and blood serum samples for bacteria isolation and determination of antibodies titers, respectively. Molecular characterization of the isolated strains was performed. Three minks from sites of highdairy farming industry and only one from sites with low-degree dairy farming were detected as infected through molecular confirmation. This study shows evidence that confirms previous findings made in southern Chile, regarding mink as host of Leptospira interrogans serovar Hardjo-prajitno associated to cattle-farming areas. However, typing information (Leptospira interrogans Copenhageni and Icterohaemorrhagiae) suggests that the consumption of rodents may also be a potential source of infection. Keywords Leptospira spp. . Cattle . Pathogen pollution . American mink
Introduction Anthropogenic changes to the landscape increasingly threaten the survival of wild species, and recently, more records exist of the negative impacts of introduced alien species on endemic populations through the co-introduction of parasites or pathogens in a process termed “pathogen pollution” (Daszak et al.
* Miguel Angel Salgado Alfaro [email protected] 1
Instituto de Medicina Preventiva Veterinaria, Facultad de Ciencias Veterinarias, Universidad Austral de Chile, Valdivia, Chile
2
Servicio Agrícola Ganadero; Región de los Ríos, Valdivia, Chile
3
Instituto de Bioquímica y Microbiología, Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad Austral de Chile, Valdivia, Chile
4
Centro de Investigación para la Sustentabilidad, Universidad Andrés Bello, Santiago, Chile
2000; Cunningham et al. 2003; Medina-Vogel 2010). A good example of pathogen pollution in aquatic ecosystems is leptospirosis, one of the most important zoonotic bacterial diseases in animals and the
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