Relative severity of experimentally induced infections corresponded to severity of clinical signs of naturally occurring infections with respective BVDV isolates.

Infection with BVDV played direct and indirect roles in enteritis in neonatal calves, causing villus atrophy in the duodenum and submucosal inflammation of the intestines. Also, BVDV potentiated effects of BRV. Concurrent infection with BVDV and BRV resulted in more severe enteric disease in neonatal calves than infection with BRV or BVDV alone.

Diagnosis of turkey Eimeria infection by conventional parasitologic methods is challenging and, until now, no molecular tools existed that clearly distinguished the four widely recognized pathogenic species: Eimeria adenoeides, E. meleagrimitis, E. gallopavonis, and E. dispersa. In this study, the internal transcribed spacer region one (ITS-1) was amplified and sequenced from 23 conventionally characterized reference samples. Phylogenic analysis segregated samples into five distinct cluster groups. The ITS-1 region(s) within each cluster were of a particular length and shared from 96% to 100% identity, while amplified ITS-1 region(s) between clusters differed in length and shared only 10.6% to 49.7% sequence identity. In addition, we developed PCR primer sets as diagnostic tools capable of specifically identifying members of each of the five clusters.

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