00:00We got a call from the rural supply store owner here one day asking us what we knew about worms
00:04in deer
00:04and whether or not they play a role in spreading drug-resistant parasites across property boundaries.
00:09And I told him up front, look, I don't know, but I'll have a look into it for you.
00:13And had a look through the literature and realised, actually, no one's ever looked into it.
00:18There's been some work done overseas, over in France and Ireland,
00:21but none of them have, they might have identified deer communities,
00:25the parasites they share with livestock, but they've never looked at whether or not they've got drug resistance.
00:28And the closest thing to that that has been done, as far as we're aware,
00:32is the work that Emily's done on her own property up in Dunedoo.
00:35So we collected samples from a bunch of wild goat, sheep and cattle on the property.
00:43And they both have been sort of observed to feed within that same sort of region on the same pastures.
00:51And we were able to look at the nemobiome,
00:53so look at the population of worms within the gastrointestinal tract using DNA-based tools.
00:59And we found a significant overlap between the nematodes shared between the different host groups.
01:06And we also found that it was the generalist sort of livestock nematodes
01:11that dominated the nemobiome community between the hosts,
01:15sort of pushing down the more native goat species.
01:20And then we also looked into resistance, which hadn't been done before,
01:23and the proportion of resistance mutations within the population.
01:27And surprisingly, there was a higher proportion of resistance mutations in the goats
01:32that had never been treated, funnily enough.
01:35So it just shows that they could potentially be a reservoir of resistance
01:41that could be shared across neighbouring farms.
01:45One thing that's really important is it challenges this dogma
01:48that an animal that's not been treated with a drug is not going to have a problem with drug resistance.
01:52But also it goes to show that, along with all the other sort of biosecurity concerns
01:56that there are surrounding deer,
01:59is that the parasite community that they transmit is one of them.
02:03And it's something that's been overlooked for a long time.
02:05We talk a lot about culling deer for biosecurity concerns
02:08for a lot of viral or bacterial pathogens and pathogens that are exotic to Australia.
02:15But no one's ever considered what they're doing to our regular worms in our sheep and cattle.
Comments