First report of Toxoplasma gondii seroprevalence in peafowls in Yunnan Province, Southwestern China

Tian, Yi-Ming; Dai, Fei-Yan; Huang, Si-Yang; Deng, Zu-Hong; Duan, Gang; Zhou, Dong-Hui; Yang, Jian-Fa; Weng, Ya-Biao; Zhu, Xing-Quan; Zou, Feng-Cai

In the present study, most of the infected birds had low titers, though MAT is considered a sensitive and specific method for detecting T. gondii antibodies in avian species, because many reports and data on isolation of viable T. gondii were available with the MAT, using isolation of the parasite as a standard [2] . However, the cut-off titer of MAT for positive infection in birds is not determined, although occasionally, viable T. gondii has been isolated from poultry with a MAT titer of only 1:5 [2, 11, 29, 30] . Therefore, we stated all titers in the present study (Table 1) . There are limited studies on the infection of T. gondii in peafowls in the world, and only one survey of T. gondii in peafowls was conducted in Shanghai Zoological Garden in China in 2000 that utilized MAT, where only 1 of the 5 examined peafowls was found positive with a titer of 1:640, the survey was conducted 10 years ago with low sampling size and the management of birds is constantly changing, hygiene in general has improved in recent years, so no firm conclusion should be drawn from that early observation.