Dengue virus (DENV) infection causes sudden fever along with several nonspecific signs and symptoms and in severe cases, death. DENV is transmitted to people by Aedes aegypti and Ae. albopictus mosquitoes, whose populations increase during rainy season. West Nile Virus (WNV), Rickettsia spp. and Leptospira spp. are fever-causing pathogens that share many of the initial symptoms of DENV infectio...

BACKGROUND Leptospirosis is an infectious and acute disease caused by Leptospira spp. that have high epidemic potential. This study verified the main Leptospira spp. serovars detected by MAT from serum of patients with suspicion of leptospirosis from 2008 to 2012 in Minas Gerais State. METHODS The laboratory received sera from 4654 patients. All serum were screened by IgM-ELISA according to t...

Received: Revised: Accepted: August 22, 2013 October 09, 2013 October 14, 2013 A molecular survey for pathogenic Leptospira spp. in kennelled dogs in Sicily, Italy, showed up to 16% of positive results. A fatal leptospirosis case was confirmed in a stray dog in the city of Palermo in May 2012. The dog, a mixed breed male, was recovered for therapy but died within an hour. Inflammation was prese...

BACKGROUND Disk diffusion susceptibility testing for Leptospira spp. on Leptospira Vanaporn Wuthiekanun (LVW) solid agar was reported recently. However, it was unclear whether the zone sizes obtained on LVW agar were comparable with those of other bacteria on Mueller-Hinton agar. METHODS Here, we evaluate the disk diffusion assay on LVW agar using the standard quality control (QC) bacterial s...

Leptospirosis is an under-reported and emerging zoonotic disease which is potentially fatal in humans. Rodents are the main reservoirs for pathogenic Leptospira spp., but diagnosis in these animals is difficult, and their infection, which does not induce symptoms, usually goes unoticed. Although the exposures of most human cases of leptospirosis are poorly documented, we were able to identify s...

The aim of the study was to determine the seroprevalence of Leptospira spp. and Borrelia burgdorferi sensu lato in healthy horses living in 7 provinces of central Italy. In the period 2007-2009, sera from 386 horses were tested by microagglutination test (MAT) to detect antibodies to Leptospira spp., employing the following serovars as antigens: Bratislava, Ballum, Canicola, Icterohaemorrhagiae...

Leptospirosis, the infection with Leptospira spp., is an apparent or unapparent disease of animals and man. It is caused by a continuously changing number of pathogenic leptospira species and serogroups. The accumulation of information in recent years on leptospirosis has shown that serovar distribution around the world is neither uniform nor stable. In other words, the most prevalent serovars ...

To evaluate the serological status for Trypanosoma cruzi, Toxoplasma gondii and Leptospira interrogans antibodies in free roaming dogs and cats from a marginated rural community in Yucatan Mexico, 100 households were visited and animals sampled. From the 106 samples, 93 were from dogs and 13 were from cats. Frequency of positive results for T. gondii, T. cruzi and Leptospira spp was 97.8%, 9.7%...

Leptospirosis is a zoonosis with multisystem involvement caused by pathogenic strains of the genus Leptospira. OmpL1 is an outer membrane protein of Leptospira spp. that is expressed during infection. In this work, we investigated novel features of this protein. We describe that OmpL1 is a novel leptospiral extracellular matrix (ECM)-binding protein and a plasminogen (PLG) receptor. The recombi...