Bacterial Infections of Nonhuman Primates

Abstract

A variety of bacterial infections can be expected to occur with considerable frequency in nonhuman primate colonies. These infections continue to be significant causes of morbidity and mortality and can have a serious impact on colony maintenance and management, domestic breeding programs, and research projects, if not actively pursued and controlled. Certain microbial agents, e.g., Shigella, Salmonella, pneumococcus and other streptococci, Staphylococcus, Hemophilus, and Yersinia, are encountered on almost a daily basis in nonhuman primate colonies. In addition, adequate microbial support will reveal numerous other bacterial pathogens that have been infrequently or rarely isolated in nonhuman primates, e.g.,Chromobacterium, Vibrio, and Listeria. The correct clinical or postmortem diagnosis is often dependent upon the results of bacterial cultures. Adequate bacteriologic support is, therefore, required in order to provide the appropriate therapy for clinical cases and to arrive at a definitive diagnosis in necropsy cases. Information provided by bacterial cultures is particularly useful in the clinical situation in three important ways. First, if bacterial cultures are available for most of the cases of infectious disease, it gives the clinician a historical data base for the relative incidence of the more common infectious conditions that occur in the colony. Since identification of the etiologic agent may take from one day to several weeks, the data base from previous culture results is an invaluable source of reference data that is specific for the colony in question and often for the species in general.KeywordsNonhuman PrimateEnteric PathogenAeromonas HydrophilaShigella FlexneriChromobacterium ViolaceumThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.