Abstract
In Nepal, gastrointestinal infections due to parasites including Entamoeba species are common. The main aim of this study was to identify species of Entamoeba using genotypic analysis. The prevalence of Entamoeba infections was examined by PCR in fecal samples from 143 inhabitants living close to wild rhesus macaques in Kathmandu, Nepal. The numbers of positive cases were one (0.7%) for E. histolytica, eight (5.6%) for E. dispar, seven (4.9%) for E. coli, and two (1.4%) for E. chattoni (E. polecki ST2). No infections with E. nuttalli, E. moshkovskii, and E. polecki ST1 were found. In E. dispar, at least seven different genotypes were detected from the eight samples by sequence analysis of tRNA-linked short tandem repeats. Different genotypes were found even in a couple from the same family. This is the first report demonstrating that E. dispar with high genotypic diversity is prevalent, rather than E. histolytica, in Kathmandu, and that zoonotic transmission of E. chattoni from rhesus macaques might occur in the inhabitants.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the late Bishnu Acharya and other staff for their help at a health checkup camp at Kathmandu. We are especially grateful to the inhabitants for their participation in the study, and to Urassaya Pattanawong, Chulalongkorn University, Thailand, for her technical assistance with microscopy. We also thank Kenji Hirayama, NEKKEN, Nagasaki University, for his encouragement of the study.
Funding
This study was supported by JSPS KAKENHI (grant numbers 24406013, 26460516, 16H05819, 17K08811 to H.T.), by a Cooperative Research Grant from NEKKEN, 2011 (H.T.), and by the National Bio-Resource Project of MEXT, Japan.
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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.
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Feng, M., Pandey, K., Yanagi, T. et al. Prevalence and genotypic diversity of Entamoeba species in inhabitants in Kathmandu, Nepal. Parasitol Res 117, 2467–2472 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00436-018-5935-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00436-018-5935-2