Rhodococcus equi is a bacterium that can cause severe pneumonia in foals. Shed in the feces of infected horses, pigs, and wild boars, it can survive in the soil and is often acquired when foals inhale it, reports The Horse.
A group of scientists in Japan thought there might be one additional critical reservoir that thus far has been missed in the R. equi life cycle: earthworms. Dr. Shinji Takai of the Laboratory of Animal Hygiene at Kitasato University School of Veterinary Medicine, reported that earthworms ingest R. equi with the soil the eat; the bacteria then reproduce abundantly in the worms' digestive system before being released back into the soil through the earthworm's feces.
Dr. Takai notes that the anaerobic state of the earthworm's intestines makes it favorable for the bacteria to reproduce.
Dr. Takai and other scientists took soil samples from two breeding farm pastures, pig pens, the school's forest, and forest and orange groves where wild boars live in Japan. They found R. equi in the digestive content of 170 earthworms and in 47 soil samples.
They then compared the amounts of bacteria in the upper and lower gut of 23 earthworms. They found that R. equi was nearly 40 times more abundant in the lower gut than in the surrounding soil, supporting the idea that the bacterium proliferates in the worm's digestive tract. The bacteria do not appear to infect the worms, but the worms are keeping the bacteria in the soil active.
This doesn't mean that farms should try to eliminate earthworms on their farm, Dr. Takai stresses. The most successful management of the disease is the removal of feces of infected foals, which will reduce the amount of R. equi that earthworms can ingest and put back into the soil.
Read more at The Horse.
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