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Alveolar echinococcosis in a dog; analysis of clinical and histological findings and molecular identification of Echinococcus multilocularis

  • Daniela Antolová EMAIL logo , Bronislava Víchová , Júlia Jarošová , Viliam Gál and Branislav Bajužík
Published/Copyright: July 4, 2018
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Abstract

Echinococcus multilocularis is a zoonotic tapeworm of medical and veterinary importance that occasionally infects accidental intermediate hosts causing severe disease or even death. In dogs, alveolar echinococcosis has been reported mainly in central Europe and Canada. The paper presents clinical, biochemical and histological signs of alveolar echinococcosis in a dog from Slovakia and the results of mitochondrial nad1 gene analysis. In 2016, 11-years old Siberian husky female suffering from inappetence was presented to the Veterinary Clinic in Žilina. Biochemical blood examination and blood count showed only minor changes, but abdominal ultrasonography showed the hepatomegaly and the presence of nonhomogeneous hypodense lobulated formation in the left liver lobe. Histological and molecular examinations of excided tissue confirmed the diagnosis of alveolar echinococcosis of the liver. BLAST analysis of E. multilocularis nad1 gene revealed that the nucleotide sequence did not exactly match the previously identified M1 (AJ237639) and/or M2 genotype (AJ237640). In total, two single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) occurred within overlapping region of nad1 gene. In the discussion, clinical and laboratory findings of the infection in other dog patients are compared and the possibilities of diagnosis and therapy of the disease are discussed.

  1. Conflicts of Interest: None.

Acknowledgement

Research was supported by the Slovak Research and Development Agency, project No. APVV-15-0114 and by the project “Application Centre for Protection of Humans, Animals and Plants against Parasites” (code ITMS: 26220220018), supported by the Research & Development Operational Programme funded by the ERDF (0.5).

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Received: 2017-10-02
Revised: 2018-03-21
Accepted: 2018-04-06
Published Online: 2018-07-04
Published in Print: 2018-09-25

© 2018 W. Stefański Institute of Parasitology, PAS

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