It is usual for muscle (Masala et al., 2003), brain and lung (Hurtado et al., 2001) tissue to be recommended for diagnosis, although a number of studies have demonstrated the potential of placental tissue (Owen et al., 1998a, Owen et al., 1998b, Hurtado et al., 2001, Masala et al., 2003 and Pereira-Bueno et al., 2004). In this study, 100% of the placentas

from the 5/35 animals testing positive using nested PCR also tested positive when the histopathological examination was used, owing to the presence of cysts. Various studies agree that fetal and placental tissues are the best to use for the PCR technique. Spalding et al. (2002) tested the PCR technique on samples of human blood and placenta selleck and Masala et al. (2003) on sheep fetuses and placentas, in order to diagnose congenital toxoplasmosis. These authors reported that the placental tissue is an excellent material for congenital toxoplasmosis diagnosis, in contrast to fetal serology,

which may detect maternal antibodies arising from the intake of colostrum, resulting in false positives. In another study, Owen et al. (1998b) also confirmed that a larger number of parasites were found in the placentas. Macroscopic examination enabled the state of conservation of the fetus to be classified and 71.45% of them were judged MK-1775 order to be autolyzed. This figure is close to that reported by Engeland et al. (1998), who examined miscarriages in goats in Norway and reported that 65% of them were autolyzed. However, the autolysis found in most of the animals examined for this study may

be due to the delay in collecting the fetuses and dispatching them to the laboratory, as well as poor conservation. This is one limitation of using a histopathological examination for diagnosis and suggests that this technique should be used as a complementary method for diagnosis of congenital toxoplasmosis. Vertical transmission of T. gondii in sheep is still not fully understood and the PCR technique is highly useful for studies of this nature Casein kinase 1 ( Williams et al., 2005 and Hide et al., 2009). The present study has provided evidence of the involvement of T. gondii in the aborted fetuses and placentas of naturally infected sheep in Brazil. No similar data have been described previously in the national literature. None. This study was financed by the Brazilian National Science Foundation (CNPq), grant number 472459/2008-2. “
“Toxoplasma gondii can cause mortality in several species of marine mammals, including sea otters ( Dubey et al., 2003 and Dubey, 2010). Freshwater runoff has been suggested as a risk factor for T. gondii infection in California sea otters ( Miller et al., 2002). It has been suggested that enough T. gondii oocysts to infect marine life can be excreted by felids on land and subsequently washed in to the sea to infect marine life ( Dabritz et al., 2007). T.