Acute systemic polyangiitis syndrome in seabird (seagull)‎, pathological study

Abstract EN

Noticeable number of dead birds were observed around the main sewage treatment station in Ismailia City.

Large number of birds is usually present around sewage channel and the post treatment lack communicated with the Seawater.

Although deaths were observed everywhere around the station, most of the deaths were found in the area around post treated water in its way to Sea.

Five sick and five freshly dead birds were used in this study.

Histological examination revealed a picture of systemic polyangiitis of the liver, kidney, heart and spleen with haemorrhagic lung.

The vascular lesion seemed to begin with perivascular edema or perivascular Leucocytic infiltration followed by fibrinoid / hyaline degeneration of the wall of small sized blood vessels with mild perivascular Leucocytic infiltration.

Blood vessels affection were not the only changes detected but parenchymal degeneration and necrosis were also observed in all the affected organs.

In the severely affected cases most of the parenchyma of the organs were lost and substituted with eosinophilic hyaline material.

Kidney and spleen were the severely affected organs followed by liver and heart in descending order.

Based on tissue reaction, no evidence for microbial cause of the syndrome was noticed.

The Vasculitis is a heterogeneous group of diseases, which are characterized by inflammatory cellular infiltration of the vascular wall often being concomitted by fibrinoid necrosis.

Affliction of vessels can be focal or segmental (Lukac and Rovensky, 1995).

The classification of vasculitis is a controversial problem, because of the difficulty in incorporating globally different criteria such as histologic features, size of affected blood vessels, etiology, pathogenesis and other factors in a single classification schema (Ghersetich et al., 1995).

Vasculitis can occur as a primary disease or as a secondary manifestation of either another illness or a type-III hypersensitivity response to a foreign antigen (Luzina and Handwerger, 2000).

Although advances in molecular and cellular immunology have defined many of the effector mechanisms that mediate inflammatory vascular damage, the cause of most vasculitis syndromes remains a mystery (Sneller and Fauci1, 1997).

Certain chemical substances often accompanied with immunmediated vasculitis (toxic necrotizing or hypersensitivity angiitis).

Arsenic, Bismuth, Gold and mercury have been reported to induce toxic necrotizing vasculitis, while several drugs as ampicillin, penicillin, chloramphinicol and others may induce hypersensitivity vasculitis (Haschck and Rousseaux, 1991).

Individual as well as combined Toxic concentrations of certain metals and biological agent in sewage and sediment have been well documented (Matsunaga, et al., 1999; And Hoffman et al., 2000).

Correlation between Sewage pollution of either marine or fresh water and systemic polyangiitis is poorly documented.

In the present study we report the histopathological picture of a fatal systemic polyangiitis in Seabirds (Seagull), and at least apparently, correlated with anaerobically digested sewage sludge pollution in Ismailia governorate.