Cryptosporidium spp.

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 : 242

2. Cryptosporidium spp. in farmed exotic animals

Cryptosporidium spp. have been commonly identified in farmed fur animals, bamboo rats, and macaque monkeys in China ( Table 1). The reported infection rates varied greatly among studies for each species of the animals examined ( Table 1). This has been attributed to levels of hygiene in the study facilities ( Li et al., 2020b). The highest infection rates were reported as 9.1% in crab-eating macaques, 15.9% in foxes, 20.5% in raccoon dogs, 29.4% in bamboo rats, and 29.6% in minks ( Table 1). They are much higher than infections rates of Cryptosporidium spp. obtained from wild populations of these animals in China and other countries, possibly due to the short history of domestication and congregations of many susceptible animals in confirmed spaces. As expected, young animals were reported to have higher prevalence of Cryptosporidium spp. than older animals ( Chen et al., 2019a; Li et al., 2020a, 2020b; Qian et al., 2020; Zhang et al., 2016a; Zhao et al., 2019). In crab-eating macaques, animals with diarrhea had higher occurrence of Cryptosporidium infection ( Chen et al., 2019a).