Abstract
Coccidiosis is an intestinal parasitic disease that causes huge economic losses in the poultry industry globally. Henan and Hubei, as important poultry production provinces in China, have great pressure for the prevention and control of chicken coccidiosis. In order to obtain information on the local prevalence of Eimeria species, we used an internal transcribed spacer 1 (ITS1) sequence of ribosomal DNA to identify the species from 318 fresh fecal samples. The fecal samples and the data relating to farm information were collected from 137 farms in Hubei and Henan provinces. As shown by genus-specific PCR results, the positivity rate of Eimeria was 97.17% (309/318), and the most common species were Eimeria mitis (66.67%), E. tenella (46.86%), and E. necatrix (41.51%). Then, we analyzed the correlation between the background information of each sample and the PCR identification results, which showed that indigenous farms in Henan province were at the greatest risk of harboring highly pathogenic Eimeria species and a larger proportion of such farms were positive for E. necatrix, the most pathogenic species. The results of this study showed that chicken coccidia was widespread, which provides important insights into the control of chicken coccidiosis in this region.
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All authors read and approved the final manuscript. The authors thank the farmers for providing fecal samples from chickens for this study. This study was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program (2016YFD0501303).
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The questionnaires were performed under the instructions of the Laboratory Animals Centre of Hubei province in the People’s Republic of China and approved by the ethical committee of Huazhong Agricultural University, according to the Regulations of the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals in China.
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Geng, T., Ye, C., Lei, Z. et al. Prevalence of Eimeria parasites in the Hubei and Henan provinces of China. Parasitol Res 120, 655–663 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00436-020-07010-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00436-020-07010-w