Search Results (5)

Dairy foods—particularly cheeses produced from raw or minimally processed milk—remain vulnerable to hazards such as Listeria monocytogenes, where delayed laboratory confirmation can expand recalls, increase food waste, and delay outbreak containment. This study proposes a veterinary-aware digital traceability framework that embeds herd health data, milk-quality testing, and inspection outcomes directly into batch-level EPCIS event records. By representing veterinary public health controls as structured, machine-actionable traceability elements, the framework enables automatic logging of mandatory control points, systematic compliance verification, and rule-based risk state transitions within standard EPCIS infrastructures. Using regulation-consistent dairy simulations modeling delayed Listeria detection during maturation, we evaluate the operational impact of event-level causal traceability within the proposed architecture. Compared with conventional time-window recall strategies, provenance-based trace-forward queries reduced recall scope under the evaluated synthetic scenarios. Integrating structured veterinary controls into EPCIS-based traceability systems supports automated regulatory evidence generation and more targeted recall decisions, contributing to improved auditability and reduced food waste in dairy supply chains. Full article

The growing demand for customized pet diets highlights the shortcomings of commercial dog foods designed for all breeds, especially when it comes to addressing breed-specific diseases, metabolic disorders, and health risks. This research presents the development and evaluation of a hybrid system for formulating wet canine food recipes. The system combines data on ingredients, veterinary feeds, and breed-related diseases; the architecture includes a recommendation module for ingredient selection and a linear programming block for recipe optimization, considering veterinary nutrient restrictions. The evaluation of the system included automatic classification of foods by specialization, visual analysis of recipe clustering, and comparison of formulas obtained by different models. The average precision of label recovery was 85.4% for TF-IDF and 88.2% for the E5 model. A comparison of ingredient extraction methods showed that machine learning produces more stable recipes, while the statistical approach provides greater variability. The developed system demonstrates potential for automating recipe creation, filling in missing data, and developing veterinary decision support platforms aimed at personalized diet selection based on the physiological needs of animals. Full article

Canine parvovirus (CPV) is a virus of veterinary health significance and a member of the Parvoviridae family. Despite its clinical significance and global distribution, surveillance is often limited to cases serious enough to result in veterinary visit and/or hospitalization, thereby limiting our understanding of its evolution and diversity. In this study, we coupled wastewater surveillance (WWS), long-range polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and long-read sequencing and demonstrate the utility of this approach for community-level monitoring of parvovirus diversity. We screened archived viral concentrates from wastewater (WW) collected monthly from July 2022 to June 2023 as part of a previous virus surveillance study from a population of ~500,000 people in Maricopa County, Arizona, USA. Using long-range PCR, the coding-complete sequences (~4.5 kb) were amplified as single contigs and sequenced on a long-read sequencer (MinION). Reads were trimmed, assembled, and contigs subjected to a bioinformatics workflow that includes phylogenetics, immuno-informatics and protein structure modelling. The ~4.5 kb amplicons were amplified from all the samples and sequenced. Twelve contigs (length: 4555 nt to 4675 nt: GC%: 35% to 36%) were assembled from 86,858 trimmed and size-selected reads (length 4400 nt–4900 nt) and all typed as parvoviruses. Overall, there were 11 CPV variants (2a, 2b and 2c) and 1 feline panleukopenia virus (FPV) variant. The FPV was 100% similar in the VP2 genomic region to the 1964 Johnson snow leopard strain present in the Felocell vaccine, suggesting recent shedding post-vaccination. For the CPVs, our analysis showed multiple amino acid substitutions in the VP2 and NS1 proteins, suggestive of host immune pressure and viral adaptation, respectively. The CPV variants clustered predominantly with North and South American variants, suggesting transboundary viral movement and multiple CPV-2c transmission chains seem evident. To the best of our knowledge, we here document the first detection of vaccine-origin FPV in WW. We show the presence of CPV-2a, 2b and 2c in the population sampled and provide evidence that suggests transmission of CPVs across the Americas. Our results also show that WWS coupled with long-range PCR and long-read sequencing is a feasible population-level complement to clinical case surveillance that also facilitates detection of vaccine-origin virus variants. The model we demonstrate here for tracking parvoviruses can also be easily extended to other DNA viruses of human and veterinary health significance. Full article

The documentation of endogenous viral elements (EVEs; virus-derived genetic material integrated into the genome of a nonviral host) has offered insights into how arthropods respond to viral infection via RNA interference pathways. Small non-coding RNAs derived from EVE loci serve to direct RNAi pathways in limiting replication and infection from cognate viruses, thus benefiting the host’s fitness and, potentially, vectorial capacity. Here we use informatic approaches to analyze nine available genome sequences of hard ticks (Acari: Ixodidae; Rhipicephalus sanguineus, R. microplus, R. annulatus, Ixodes ricinus, I. persulcatus, I. scapularis, Hyalomma asiaticum, Haemaphysalis longicornis, and Dermacentor silvarum) to identify endogenous viral elements and to illustrate the shared ancestry of all elements identified. Our results highlight a broad diversity of viral taxa as having given rise to 1234 identified EVEs in ticks, with Mononegavirales (specifically Rhabdoviridae) well-represented in this subset of hard ticks. Further investigation revealed extensive adintovirus integrations in several Ixodes species, the prevalence of Bunyavirales EVEs (notably not observed in mosquitoes), and the presence of several elements similar to known emerging human and veterinary pathogens. These results will inform subsequent work on current and past associations with tick species with regard to the viruses from which their “viral fossils” are derived and may serve as a reference for quality control of various tick-omics data that may suffer from misidentification of EVEs as viral genetic material. Full article

This study presents and validates the psychometric characteristics of a short form of the Critical Thinking Self-assessment Scale (CTSAS). The original CTSAS was composed of six subscales representing the six components of Facione’s conceptualisation of critical thinking. The CTSAS short form kept the same structures and reduced the number of items from 115 in the original version, to 60. The CTSAS short form was tested with a sample of 531 higher education students from five countries (Germany, Greece, Lithuania, Romania, and Portugal) enrolled in different disciplinary fields (Business Informatics, Teacher Education, English as a Foreign Language, Business and Economics, and Veterinary Medicine). The confirmatory analysis was used to test the new instrument reliability, internal consistency, and construct validity. Both the models that hypothesized the six factors to be correlated and to tap into a second-order factor representing the complex concept of critical thinking, had acceptable fit to the data. The instrument showed strong internal consistency (α = 0.969) and strong positive correlations between skills and between the skills and the overall scale (p < 0.05). Despite the unbalanced sex distribution in the population (close to 75% females), the instrument retained its factorial structure invariance across sexes. Therefore, the new instrument shows adequate goodness of fit and retained stability and reliability, and is proposed as a valid and reliable means to evaluate and monitor critical thinking in university students. Full article