RESUMO
BACKGROUND: Histoplasma capsulatum and Pneumocystis organisms cause host infections primarily affecting the lung tissue. H. capsulatum is endemic in the United States of America and Latin American countries. In special environments, H. capsulatum is commonly associated with bat and bird droppings. Pneumocystis-host specificity has been primarily studied in laboratory animals, and its ability to be harboured by wild animals remains as an important issue for understanding the spread of this pathogen in nature. Bats infected with H. capsulatum or Pneumocystis spp. have been found, with this mammal serving as a probable reservoir and disperser; however, the co-infection of bats with both of these microorganisms has never been explored. To evaluate the impact of H. capsulatum and Pneumocystis spp. infections in this flying mammal, 21 bat lungs from Argentina (AR), 13 from French Guyana (FG), and 88 from Mexico (MX) were screened using nested-PCR of the fragments, employing the Hcp100 locus for H. capsulatum and the mtLSUrRNA and mtSSUrRNA loci for Pneumocystis organisms. RESULTS: Of the 122 bats studied, 98 revealed H. capsulatum infections in which 55 of these bats exhibited this infection alone. In addition, 51 bats revealed Pneumocystis spp. infection of which eight bats exhibited a Pneumocystis infection alone. A total of 43 bats (eight from AR, one from FG, and 34 from MX) were found co-infected with both fungi, representing a co-infection rate of 35.2% (95% CI = 26.8-43.6%). CONCLUSION: The data highlights the H. capsulatum and Pneumocystis spp.co-infection in bat population's suggesting interplay with this wild host.
Assuntos
Quirópteros , Coinfecção/veterinária , Histoplasma/isolamento & purificação , Histoplasmose/veterinária , Infecções por Pneumocystis/veterinária , Pneumocystis/isolamento & purificação , Animais , Argentina , Guiana , México , Dados de Sequência Molecular , Reação em Cadeia da Polimerase , RNA Ribossômico/genética , Análise de Sequência de DNARESUMO
Histoplasma capsulatum is a dimorphic fungus that is widely distributed in the tropical or subtropical areas of the world and infects several mammalian hosts, mainly bats. Infective propagules grow in bat and bird droppings. A specific molecular marker, a highly sensitive fragment of a co-activator protein-coding gene (Hcp100), was used to detect H. capsulatum in lung samples of wild and captive bats from France using a nested polymerase chain reaction. To determine whether bats in France are potential carriers of H. capsulatum, 83 bats were sampled from two regions in France. Sixty-one specimens belonging to the Pteropus rodricensis (n = 45) and Rousettus aegyptiacus (n = 16) species were collected from a zoologic park (La Palmyre, western France). Twenty-two specimens were recovered from the Natural History Museum (Bourges) including the species Plecotus austriacus (n = 1), Pipistrellus pipistrellus (n = 3), and Nyctalus noctula (n = 18). From the lung DNA samples of 83 dead bats, only one sample of an N. noctula bat from Bourges amplified the H. capsulatum Hcp100 marker. The amplified product was sequenced and revealed a high similarity to the G217B H. capsulatum reference strain sequence that was deposited in the GenBank database. This finding suggests that H. capsulatum is an environmental pathogen in France that may infect bats.