Abstract
A case of Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection is described in a dead adult male dog in Southern Italy. The carcass was found by the Health Authority in a gypsy encampment. It was admitted to our forensic veterinary medicine unit, with a suspicion of cruelty to the animal. Necropsy showed beating and traumatism signs, and mistreating was confirmed. Gross lesions included multiple nodular hepatic lesions, hemorrhagic enteritis with enlarged mesenteric lymph nodes, body cavity effusions, and an adrenal neoplasm. Bacteriological and molecular analyses were carried out on the liver lesions that enabled to identify M. tuberculosis SIT42 (LAM9). Drug-resistance patterns were evaluated by screening mutations on the rpoB and katG genes that showed susceptibility to both rifampin and isoniazid, respectively. Very few studies report canine tuberculosis, and little is known about the disease in Italy. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first report of Mycobacterium tuberculosis SIT42 infection in a dog in Italy.
Highlights
Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) is one of the causative agents of tuberculosis (TB), a chronic disease that affects both animals and humans
The dog was submitted to a complete necropsy performed by post-graduated veterinarians of the Unit of Forensic Veterinary Medicine according to standard protocols [18]
Consensus sequences for katG and rpoB were obtained by ClustalW analysis, deposited in GenBank, and compared with the corresponding sequence of the reference strain M. tuberculosis H37Rv (GenBank accession number AL123456.3)
Summary
Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) is one of the causative agents of tuberculosis (TB), a chronic disease that affects both animals and humans. The ante mortem diagnostic approach of canine TB is difficult for the absence of symptoms in infected dogs [9, 14], complicated by the absence of a validated immunological assay [3, 12]. This species shows poor response to tuberculin skin test (TST) injection both of M. tuberculosis (Manteaux test) and M. bovis purified protein derivate (PPD) tuberculin and a high percentage of false negatives and false positives to serological examinations, too [12, 14, 17]
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