Abstract
A herd-based study was carried out in Central Equatoria State, Southern Sudan, to study epidemiological aspects of tick-borne diseases. Six herds of cattle situated in three different locations were selected and investigated every 3 months during the year 2005. Blood smears for Giemsa staining and blood spots on filter paper for deoxyribonucleic acid extraction were collected from 600 apparently healthy indigenous cattle. A total of 69 (11.5%) samples showed the presence of piroplasms in Giemsa-stained blood smears, and polymerase chain reaction increased the detection limit to 297 (49.5%). Using reverse line blot, it was possible to detect and differentiate eight different piroplasms namely, Theileria parva (71.2%), Theileria mutans (73%), Theileria velifera (45.3%), Theileria taurotragi (2.7%), Theileria buffeli (0.5%), Theileria annulata (0.2%), Babesia bovis (1.7%), and Babesia bigemina (0.3%). Mixed infections were detected in 406 samples (67.7%) accounting for 17 different combinations. High infection of Theileria parva was reported among young calves compared to older cattle. The highest prevalence of Theileria parva was reported in the rainy season (October). The implications of these results on the epidemiology of tick-borne diseases are discussed with emphasis on East Coast fever.
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Acknowledgments
The professional assistance of Dr. Wani Lako and Mr. John Wani in the samples collection is gratefully acknowledged. The authors are grateful to Dr. Moses N. Kyule, Free University of Berlin, for performing the statistical analysis. This research was supported by the International Foundation for Science, Stockholm, Sweden, and the Organisation of Islamic Conference Standing Committee on Scientific and Technological Cooperation (COMSTECH), Islamabad, Pakistan, through a grant (IFS grant 3765-1) to Mr. Diaeldin Ahmed Salih. This work has been facilitated through The Integrated Consortium on Ticks and Tick-borne Diseases (ICTTD-3) financed by the International Cooperation Programme of the European Union through Coordination Action Project no. 510561. We declare that the experiments performed and presented in this report comply with the current laws of the Federal Republic of Germany and Sudan. This work is published with the kind permission of the Director-General, Animal Resources Research Corporation, Sudan.
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Nucleotide sequences data reported in this paper are available in GenBank™ database under the accession numbers EF469603, EF469604, EF469605, EF469606, and EF469607.
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Salih, D.A., El Hussein, A.M., Seitzer, U. et al. Epidemiological studies on tick-borne diseases of cattle in Central Equatoria State, Southern Sudan. Parasitol Res 101, 1035–1044 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00436-007-0583-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00436-007-0583-y