Cryptosporidium species

Guo, Yaqiong, Li, Na, Feng, Yaoyu & Xiao, Lihua, 2021, Zoonotic parasites in farmed exotic animals in China: Implications to public health, International Journal for Parasitology: Parasites and Wildlife 14, pp. 241-247 : 243

2.3. Cryptosporidium species and subtypes in macaques

Four Cryptosporidium species have been identified in farmed macaques, mostly in southern China. They include C. hominis , C. parvum , C. muris and C. ubiquitum . The dominant species is C. hominis , which was identified in all studies conducted in farmed crab-eating and rhesus macaques ( Table 1). Other Cryptosporidium species were only detected in one study conducted in crab-eating macaques on a large farm in Hainan ( Chen et al., 2019a). On that farm, significant number of animals were infected with C. parvum and C. muris in addition to C. hominis . The intensity of oocyst shedding was higher in animals infected with C. hominis than those infected with C. parvum and C. muris ( Chen et al., 2019a) .

The C. hominis subtypes detected in farmed macaques all belong to the unique C. hominis monkey genotype with divergent small subunit (SSU) rRNA gene sequence ( Chen et al., 2019a; Feng et al., 2018; Karim et al., 2014c; Zhao et al., 2019). At the gp60 locus, they were from three unusual subtype families of Ii (IiA17), Im (ImA18), and In (InA14, InA17, and InA26), and one common subtype family Ib ( Chen et al., 2019a; Karim et al., 2014c; Zhao et al., 2019). The Ib subtype identified at the gp60 locus was IbA12G3, which at the SSU rRNA locus was identified as C. hominis monkey genotype ( Karim et al., 2014c). Other subtypes of the Ib subtype family in humans have the typical SSU rRNA sequences of C. hominis ( Feng et al., 2018) . The C. parvum identified in crab-eating macaques belong to IIoA14G1 (n = 18) and IIdA19G1 (n = 2). Of clinical significance, C. hominis ImA18 subtype and C. parvum IIoA14G1 subtype were detected in animals with diarrhea whereas the remaining ones were mostly found in asymptomatic animals ( Chen et al., 2019a).