Abstract
A serological survey of Toxoplasma gondii was conducted on 766 domestic and peridomestic rodents from 46 trapping sites throughout the city of Niamey, Niger. A low seroprevalence was found over the whole town with only 1.96% of the rodents found seropositive. However, differences between species were important, ranging from less than 2% in truly commensal Mastomys natalensis, Rattus rattus and Mus musculus, while garden-associated Arvicanthis niloticus displayed 9.1% of seropositive individuals. This is in line with previous studies on tropical rodents--that we reviewed here--which altogether show that Toxoplasma seroprevalence in rodent is highly variable, depending on many factors such as locality and/or species. Moreover, although we were not able to decipher statistically between habitat or species effect, such a contrast between Nile grass rats and the other rodent species points towards a potentially important role of environmental toxoplasmic infection. This would deserve to be further scrutinised since intra-city irrigated cultures are extending in Niamey, thus potentially increasing Toxoplasma circulation in this yet semi-arid region. As far as we are aware of, our study is one of the rare surveys of its kind performed in Sub-Saharan Africa and the first one ever conducted in the Sahel.
Highlights
A serological survey of Toxoplasma gondii was conducted on 766 domestic and peridomestic rodents from 46 trapping sites throughout the city of Niamey, Niger
From the 46 trapping sites sampled for the present study, 766 rodents could be surveyed for Toxoplasma serology: 123 were black rats (Rattus rattus), 61 were house mice (M. musculus), 66 were Nile grass rats (Arvicanthis niloticus), 12 were giant Gambian rats (Cricetomys gambianus), two were slender gerbils (Taterillus gracilis) and 502 belonged to the genus Mastomys (Supplementary data)
We can conclude that all Mastomys that were trapped in the present survey belong to one single species, namely M. natalensis
Summary
A serological survey of Toxoplasma gondii was conducted on 766 domestic and peridomestic rodents from 46 trapping sites throughout the city of Niamey, Niger. A survey conducted on 218 pregnant women in Niamey showed a slightly higher value (i.e. 15.1%) and the most recent survey for the city indicated a global seroprevalence of 18.1% (Table I) On this basis, previous authors have considered toxoplasmosis not to be of primary importance for public health in Niger. In 2010, 37% of patient admissions in the reference maternity hospital in Niamey concerned “abortions” (SNIS 2010) Such statistics need to be handled with great care since many - if not most - of these cases may be due to complications following illegal abortions (voluntary termination is prohibited in Niger).
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