Abstract

Q fever is a zoonotic disease caused by the Rickettsial organism Coxiella burnetii. The objective of this study was to determine the prevalence rate of C. burnetii in bulk milk samples from dairy goat herds in Fars, Ghom, Kerman, Khuzestan and Yazdprovinces, Iran. In this study, 296 bulk milk samples from 89 dairy goat herds were tested for C. burnetii using a nested polymerase chain reaction (PCR) assay. The animals which their milk samples were collected for this study were clinically healthy. In total, six out of 296 (2.0%) goat milk samples were positive; the positive samples were 4 out of 22 (18.2%) dairy herds in Fars, 1 out of 24 (4.2%) dairy herds in Khuzestan and 1 out of 18 (5.5%) dairy herds in Yazd. All the 76 goat bulk milk samples from 25 goat breeding farms collected in Ghom and Kerman provinces were negative. Although, no extensive prevalence study was undertaken, the results of this study indicate that those clinically healthy dairy goats were important sources of C. burnetii infection in Iran.

Key words: Coxiella burnetii, polymerase chain reaction (PCR), milk, goat, Iran