The Etiology, Risk Factors, and Interactions of Enteric Infections and Malnutrition and the Consequences for Child Health and Development (MAL-ED) project was carried out as a collaborative project supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (47075), the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health, and the National Institutes of Health, Fogarty International Center. M.N.K. was additionally supported by the Sherrilyn and Ken Fisher Center for Environmental Infectious Diseases of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (10POS2015). F.S. was supported by FONDECYT-CONCYTEC (grant contract number 246-2015-FONDECYT), and the National Institutes of Health Fogarty Global Health Fellows Consortium comprised of Johns Hopkins University, the University of North Carolina, Morehouse University, and Tulane University (grant no. D43TW009340). The funders had no role in study design, data collect...

The performance of eight microbial source tracking (MST) markers was evaluated in a low-resource, tropical community located in Iquitos, Peru. Fecal samples from humans, dogs, cats, rats, goats, buffalos, guinea-pigs, chickens, ducks, pigeons, and parrots were collected (n = 117). All samples were tested with human (BacHum, HF183-Taqman), dog (BactCan), pig (Pig-2-Bac), and avian (LA35, Av4143, ND5, cytB) markers using quantitative PCR (qPCR). Internal validity metrics were calculated using all animal fecal samples, as well as animal fecal samples contextually relevant for the Peruvian Amazon. Overall, Pig-2-Bac performed best, with 100% sensitivity and 88.5% specificity to detect the correct fecal source. Human-associated markers showed a sensitivity of 80.0% and 76.7%, and specificity of 66.2% and 67.6%. When limiting the analysis to contextually relevant animal fecal samples for the P...