background: echinococcosis/hydatidosis is considered endemic in mauritania. the aim of this study is to present an epidemiological study on the echinococcosis in man and animals in the nouakchott region. methods: the internal organs from livestock carcasses were inspected for research of hydatid cysts. the hydatid fluid was examined for research of the protoscoleces. dogs were necropsied for th...

In this study, 130 Escherichia coli strains isolated from 306 cattle and sheep fecal samples were studied for their resistance to 10 antibiotics, verotoxin production, and hemolyzation. The antibiotic resistance rates of the E. coli strains were as follows: tetracycline, 51.6%; streptomycin, 24.2%; ampicillin, 13.1%; amoxicillin/clavulanic acid, 5.2%; gentamycin, 4.6%; ciprofloxacin, 4.6%; trim...

Massese is an Italian dairy sheep breed characterized by animals with black skin and horns and black or apparent grey hairs. Owing to the presence of these two coat colour types, this breed can be considered an interesting model to evaluate the effects of coat colour gene polymorphisms on this phenotypic trait. Two main loci have been already shown to affect coat colour in sheep: Agouti and Ext...

enterohemorrhagic escherichia coli (ehec) of the o157:h7 serotype is a worldwide zoonotic pathogen responsible for the majority of severe cases of human ehec disease. the aim of the present study was to investigate the prevalence of e. coli o157: h7/nm in raw meat samples from two provinces of iran. during a period from march 2010 to march 2011. two hundred and ninety five raw meat samples were...

BACKGROUND Comparatively little is known about the prevalence or the molecular characteristics of the zoonotic pathogen E. coli O157:H7 in the sheep reservoir. To investigate this and determine the host specificity of subclones of the bacterium, we have conducted a slaughterhouse prevalence study in sheep and compared the collected isolates to O157:H7 previously isolated from cattle and human p...

genetic improvement programs may improve disease resistance in animal production. the best-characterized genetic control of disease resistance and immune response in animals is the one associated with the major histocompatibility complex (mhc). the ovine lymphocyte antigenof drb1 gene encodes cell surface glycoproteins that initiate immune responses by presenting processed antigenic peptides to...

The oocyte-to-embryo transition in mammals depends on maternal proteins and transcripts, which accumulate during oocyte differentiation. The aim of the present study was to examine the role of the junctional proteins beta-catenin and E-cadherin during preimplantation in vitro embryo development in sheep, comparing the competence of adult and prepubertal oocytes. We analysed the concentration of...

The investigation of an outbreak of hemorrhagic-uremic syndrome in Norway in 2006 indicated that the outbreak strain Escherichia coli O103:H25 could originate from sheep. A national survey of the Norwegian sheep population was performed, with the aim of identifying and describing a possible reservoir of potentially human-pathogenic E. coli O103, in particular of the H types 2 and 25. The invest...

Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) has been used extensively to study population genetics because it has the unique features of maternal inheritance, a relatively fast rate of evolution and lack of recombination. A total of 82 unrelated sheep from 10 Iranian indigenous sheep breeds were investigated to determinate the maternal genetic diversity using a sequence of a 685 bp segment of the displacement lo...

A copro-antigen capture ELISA for the detection of Teladorsagia circumcincta infection in sheep was developed and evaluated. Experiments with faeces from worm-free sheep, that had been spiked with known concentrations of excretory-secretory (E-S) antigen indicated that a positive signal was generated with 180 ng of E-S/ml. A nested design, based on 8 infected and 8 worm-free sheep, was employed...