How Important Is Rotavirus As a Cause of Foal Diarrhoea? A Case-control Study of Diarrhoea in Australian Foals

Aims: Foal diarrhoea is a disease in horses worldwide that is labour intensive, costly to manage, and the aetiology is often not determined. The aim of this study was to conduct a prospective age-matched case–control investigation of diarrhoea in foals, while developing a sensitive molecular diagnostic screening panel. The results presented here describe a reverse transcription quantitative polymerase chain reaction (RT-qPCR) to detect rotavirus in foal faeces. 

Methods: Faecal samples were collected on 5 Thoroughbred breeding farms in New South Wales, Australia, from foals with diarrhoea and an age-matched control. A case was any foal with diarrhoea on the day of sampling. A control was a foal without diarrhoea on the day of sampling, born within 7 days of the case foal. A rotavirus RT-qPCR assay targeting the rotavirus nonstructural protein 3 was performed on nucleic acids extracted from faecal samples using the MoBio PowerSoil DNA Isolation Kit. [...]