Generating super-shedders: co-infection increases bacterial load and egg production of a gastrointestinal helminth

Lass, Sandra; Hudson, Peter J.; Thakar, Juilee; Saric, Jasmina; Harvill, Eric; Albert, Réka; Perkins, Sarah E.

To determine that the number of helminth, eggs shed were a good proxy for transmission potential of the helminth we cultured helminth eggs from faecal samples to their infectious L3 larval stage. After 10 days of culture at 208C to ensure the inclusion of early and late hatching larvae, we quantified the L3 stages produced using a 'whites trap' [37, 38] using faeces from the single (n ¼ 9) and co-infected animals (n ¼ 7) on day 21 post-inoculation. To assess whether differences existed between co-infected and single-infected groups in the viability of eggs maturing to the L3 infectious stage, we carried out a GLM with normally distributed errors with treatment as the explanatory variable (i.e. single or co-infected) and the number of L3 larvae per gram of faeces as a response variable [35] .