Main topic : Surveillance and control of emerging diseases
FRENCH ROE DEER AS A RESERVOIR OF VECTOR-BORNE HAEMOPARASITES FOR LIVESTOCK AND HUMANS? DATA FROM THE FRENCH DEPARTEMENT OF AIN.
PELLETIER C. 1, TISSERANT M. 1
1 LDA01, BOURG-EN-BRESSE, France
Introduction
While improving surveillance systems for emerging pathogens in livestock and humans requires early detection in wildlife, while hyperthermia-anemia syndromes are on the rise in livestock when in parallel tick and deer populations are booming, while in 2020 a first case of tick-borne encephalitis by consumption of goat cheese was described in the French department of Ain, there are still very few data in France on the possible role of roe deer as a reservoir for haemoparasites such as Anaplasma phagocytophilum, Babesia, Mycoplasma wenyonii or Tick-Borne Encephalitis Virus (TBEV).
We then decided to study on more than 150 samples of roe deer kept in the laboratory the prevalence of 11 haemoparasites of livestock ruminants and/or for humans, using in-house real-time PCR tests.
Methods
155 spleens, dried blood spot (DBS) and ears of roe deer had been collected, in a representative manner throughout the territory of our French department, during fall 2020 and 2021.
Each ear was examined to determine the carriage of hematophagous arthropods such as ticks (number, stage) and Lipoptena.
Total nucleic acid extraction and purification were performed on spleen and DBS using respectively MagMAX™ Pathogen RNA/DNA kit on KingFisher Flex device (ThermoFisher Scientific) and QIAamp DNA mini kit (Qiagen). Six in-house multiplex real-time PCR tests, each with endogenous Internal Positive Control (Gapdh) were developed: