Equine babesiosis is a hemoprotozoan tickborne disease with worldwide distribution and caused by Theileria equi and Babesia caballi. This study was conducted to determine the seroprevalence of T. equi and B. caballi infection in Turkoman breed horses in North Khorasan Province of Iran. Blood samples were collected from 100 apparently healthy horses and examined by microscopy and indirect immuno...

Consider-then-choose models, borne out by empirical literature in marketing and psychology, explain that customers choose among alternatives two phases, first screening products to decide which consider then ranking them. In this paper, we develop a dynamic programming framework study the computational aspects of assortment optimization under consider-then-choose premises. Although nonparametri...

The M-protein genes of Streptococcus equi isolated from 17 outwardly healthy horses after 4 strangles outbreaks had ended, including a quarantined animal, were compared with those of S. equi isolates from 167 active cases of strangles across 4 countries. The healthy horses included 16 persistent S. equi carriers, at least one from each of the four outbreaks. These carriers, despite being outwar...

Equi merozoite antigens 1 and 2 (EMA-1 and EMA-2) are Babesia equi proteins expressed on the parasite surface during infection in horses and are orthologues of proteins in Theileria spp., which are also tick-transmitted protozoal pathogens. We determined in this study whether EMA-1 and EMA-2 were expressed within the vector tick Boophilus microplus. B. equi transitions through multiple, morphol...

Rhodococcus equi is an important pathogen of foals that causes severe pneumonia. To date, there is no licensed vaccine effective against R. equi pneumonia of foals. The objectives of our study were to develop an electron beam (eBeam) inactivated vaccine against R. equi and evaluate its immunogenicity. A dose of eBeam irradiation that inactivated replication of R. equi while maintaining outer ce...

The goal of this research was to examine the role of cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTL) in the control of Rhodococcus equi and specifically to determine if R. equi-specific CD8+ CTL occurred in the blood of immune horses. Equine peripheral blood mononuclear cells stimulated with antigen-presenting cells either infected with R. equi or exposed to soluble R. equi antigen lysed R. equi-infected target ...

A conflict-avoiding code (CAC) C of length n and weight k is a collection of k-subsets of Zn such that Δ(x) ∩ Δ(y) = ∅ for any x, y ∈ C and x = y, where Δ(x) = {a − b : a, b ∈ x, a = b}. Let CAC(n, k) denote the class of all CACs of length n and weight k. A CAC C ∈ CAC(n, k) is said to be equi-difference if any codeword x ∈ C has the form {0, i, 2i, . . . , (k − 1)i}. A CAC with maximum size is...

SUMMARY For the evaluation of the epidemiology of Theileria equi and Babesia caballi in a herd of 510 horses in SW Mongolia, several mathematical models of the transmission dynamics are constructed. Because the field data contains information on the presence of the parasite (determined by PCR) and the presence of antibodies (determined by IFAT), the models cater for maternal protection with ant...

Linear B-cell epitopes of the Rhodococcus equi virulence-associated protein (VapA) were mapped using a synthetic peptide bank in this study. The peptides were screened in an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) with a total of 70 sera from foals with current R. equi disease (51 sera), as well as from foals that had either recovered from R. equi infection 10 months previously (3 sera) or th...