Comparative Analysis Of Results On Toxoplasma Infection By Serosurvey And Nested PCR In A Goat Farm

Toxoplasma gondii, an intracellular protozoan parasite, often causes latent infectionwithout obvious clinical symptoms. At the same time, T. gondii is a kind of importantzoonotic parasite, and can infect almost all species of warm-blooded animals, includinghuman and goat. Goat can be infected with T. gondii and cause miscarriage, stillbirth, birthdeformities, which seriously affect the dairy goat growth and breeding, so T. gondii causehuge economic losses to the livestock industry. T. gondii can infect people via animal meat,eggs, milk and other products directly or indirectly. In recent years, the goat milk becomesone of the major consumer goods for people because of its high nutritional value and potentialhealthy function for human. Previous studies indicated goat may paly singnificant role inhuamn infection. may pose a threat to human health. Therefore, understanding the situationsof T. gondii infection in goat will provide information and basis for prevention and treatmentof toxoplasmosis.Here, the present study was to investigate the prvalence of T. gondii in dairy goat fromGuanzhong region based on IHA and nested PCR. The results showed that:1. A total of332serum samples of dairy goats were diagnosed by IHA in a goat farm, theresults revealed99serum samples were positive, and T. gondii infection rate was about29.82%, the infection of T. gondii was very high. The T. gondii infection rate were ram(34.21%) and ewe (28.52%); Adult sheeps (30.66%), the young sheeps (28.33%).2. To extract DNA from all samples, and T. gondii529bp gene repeat sequence wasamplified by nested PCR, the results revealed72samples were positive. BLAST analysis hadhigh identity values (>99%) wit T. gondii, and the positive rate was21.69%.3. To compare and analyze the results between IHA and nested PCR.52samples wereamplified successfully by nested PCR among99serum-positive samples; while,20sampleswere positive in233serum-negative samples. The differences of prevalence between twomethods were compared using the χ2test in Statistic Package for Social Science (SPSS).Differences were considered statistically significant at P <0.05.