"Detección de leptospira en ratas domésticas del cantón Portoviejo durante el año 2019"

Abstract

Leptospirosis is an acute and feverish infectious disease, caused by a bacterium of the genus Leptospira, which could affect wild and domestic animals serving as a source of infection for man. Domestic rodents are synanthropic animals and are implicated as the main carriers and disseminators of leptospira, as they are considered primary hosts of the bacteria. The sources of contamination with the pathogen can be multiple, including contact with fomites, tissues and urine of infected animals. The present study determined the presence of pathogenic leptospira using the microscopic agglutination technique (MAT) in 3 species of rodents, Mus Musculus, Rattus Rattus and Rattus Norvegicus from the canton Portoviejo, from March to November 2019. From a total of 82 rodents, 80 samples were viable for processing, the same ones that were faced with a diagnostic battery comprised of 6 serovars of leptospira, obtaining 18.8% (15/80) of seropositivity. The most positive serovar was the Tarassovi serovar with 6,3%. The rodent species with the highest MAT seropositivity were Mus Musculus and Rattus Norvegicus with 8.8%, respectively, unlike Rattus Rattus, which was observed in 1%. According to the sex of the rodents sampled in the Portoviejo canton, it was established that the males were the only ones that seroreacted against the MAT against leptospira in 100.0% (15/15), unlike the females. These results indicate an exposure to leptospires of pathogenic serovars by the 3 species of domestic rodents in the canton, which gives us an indication of the vulnerability in which people and other animals are, being in constant contact direct with rodents, since they are important carriers and dispersers of the bacteria through their urine.