Abstract

Leptospirosis is one of the most common zoonotic infections worldwide, including in most livestock, some companion animals, horses, wildlife, and humans. Epidemiological estimation of its prevalence in all species is difficult due to the variety of clinical presentations and challenges regarding laboratory diagnosis. The purpose of this study was to measure the seroprevalence of leptospiral infection in Arabian horses kept in the largest breeding farms in Poland, representing over 15% of the Polish Arabian horse population. Leptospira antibodies were detected by MAT (cut-off 1:100) in 33.2% of serum samples (204 of 615 animals) (CI 95%: 29.6–37.0%), most frequently reacting with the serovar Grippotyphosa, similar to previous reports in populations of randomly selected horses. These results indicated high Leptospira seropositivity, thus, although any form of clinical leptospirosis is rare, it may be postulated that the leptospiral exposure is widespread.

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

6-1-2021

Notes/Citation Information

Published in Pathogens, v. 10, issue 6, 688.

© 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.

This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.3390/pathogens10060688

Funding Information

The study was partially supported by a grant from National Science Centre on the basis of the decision No DEC-2011/03/B/NZ6/04682. The study was partly supported by the grant from the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Republic of Poland, decision no. 9506/E385/R/2018.

Related Content

All data and materials are available in Division of Veterinary Epidemiology and Economics, Institute of Veterinary Medicine, Warsaw University of Life Sciences-SGGW, Nowoursynowska 159c, 02-776 Warsaw, Poland.

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