background:   the objective was to determine the prevalence of ectoparasite infestations in referred companion dogs to veterinary hospital of shahid chamran university of ahvaz, from 2009 to 2010 . methods: a total of 126 dogs were sampled for ectoparasites and examined by parasitological methods. the studied animals were grouped based on the age (<1 year, 1–3 years and >3 years), sex, breed an...

BACKGROUND Saliva of hematophagous arthropods contains a diverse mixture of compounds that counteracts host hemostasis. Immunomodulatory and antiinflammatory components are also found in these organisms' saliva. Blood feeding evolved at least ten times within arthropods, providing a scenario of convergent evolution for the solution of the salivary potion. Perhaps because of immune pressure from...

Vol. 7, No. 3 Supplement, June 2001 Emerging Infectious Diseases 539 Plague, caused by the bacteria Y. pestis, is a disease of rodents and their fleas that occasionally is transmitted to other animals and humans. Three worldwide pandemics, causing millions of deaths, have been recorded. The last one, which began in the 19th century, reached the Americas. A few natural plague foci are found in t...

The flea-borne rickettsioses murine typhus (Rickettsia typhi) and flea-borne spotted fever (FBSF) (Rickettsia felis) are febrile diseases distributed among humans worldwide. Murine typhus has been known to be endemic to Kenya since the 1950s, but FBSF was only recently documented in northeastern (2010) and western (2012) Kenya. To characterize the potential exposure of humans in Kenya to flea-b...

Yersinia pestis, the causative agent of plague, has recently diverged from the less virulent enteropathogen Yersinia pseudotuberculosis. Its emergence has been characterized by massive genetic loss and inactivation and limited gene acquisition. The acquired genes include two plasmids, a filamentous phage, and a few chromosomal loci. The aim of this study was to characterize the chromosomal regi...

We studied the effect of air temperature and RH on the survival time of adult Xenopsylla conformis Wagner, 1903 and Xenopsylla ramesis Rothschild, 1904 fleas during starvation to explain the paratopic habitat distribution of these species on opposite ends of a precipitation and temperature gradient in the Negev Highlands, Israel. We hypothesized that the pattern of distribution of the two flea ...