INTRODUCING THE NEGLECTED TROPICAL DISEASES Over the past two centuries, advances in the understanding of communicable diseases have led to considerable reductions in their global burden. Due to advances in sanitation, germ theory, vaccination, antimicrobial drugs, and other factors, infectious disease is no longer the leading cause of death in the developed world.1 In poor areas of the world, ...

Recent studies reported comparatively lower heterotrophic bacteria (HB) abundances in tropical regions, indicating that factors involved in bacterial losses could be more relevant in the tropics. Heterotrophic nanoflagellates (HNF) are considered the main predators of HB in aquatic ecosystems, and one should expect higher abundances in the tropics because of differences in the food web configur...

Carbon fluxes from tropical deforestation and regrowth are highly uncertain components of the contemporary carbon budget, due in part to the lack of spatially explicit and consistent information on changes in forest area. We estimate fluxes for the 1980s and 1990s using subpixel estimates of percent tree cover derived from coarse (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Advanced Very ...

Tropical South America is rich in different groups of pollinators, but the biotic and abiotic factors determining the geographical distribution of their species richness are poorly understood. We analyzed the species richness of three groups of pollinators (bees and wasps, butterflies, hummingbirds) in six tropical forests in the Bolivian lowlands along a gradient of climatic seasonality and pr...

Zooplankton blooms are a frequent phenomenon in tropical systems. However, drivers of bloom formation and the contribution of emerging resting eggs are largely unexplored. We investigated the dynamics and the triggers of rotifer blooms in African soda-lakes and assessed their impact on other trophic levels. A meta-analysis of rotifer peak densities including abundances of up to 6 × 105 individu...

BACKGROUND Globally about one third of the total population is estimated to be infected with intestinal parasites, of which, the majority are people living in tropical and sub-tropical parts of the world. Cases of intestinal parasitosis are also highly abundant in Ethiopia and hence the aim of present study was to assess prevalence and predictors of intestinal parasitic infections among food ha...

Reply to: Abdel-Salam OME. Preference for hot pepper: A complex interplay of personal, cultural, and pharmacological effects. Temperature 2016; 3:38-9; http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/ 23328940.2015.1111289; Bosland PW. Hot stuff – do people living in hot climates like their food spicy hot or not? Temperature 2016; 3:40-1; http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23328940.2015.1130521; Caterina MJ. Seeking the trop...

Characterizationofantimicrobial resistance inSalmonella enterica foodandanimal isolates fromColombia: identi¢cationofa qnrB19mediatedquinolone resistancemarker in twonovel serovars Maria Karczmarczyk, Marta Martins, Matthew McCusker, Salim Mattar, Leonard Amaral, Nola Leonard, Frank M. Aarestrup & Séamus Fanning Centres for Food Safety & Food-borne Zoonomics, UCD Veterinary Sciences Centre, Uni...

In terms of tonnage, sorghum is Africa’s second most important cereal. The continent produces about 20 million tonnes of sorghum per annum, about one-third of the world crop. However, these figures do not do justice to the importance of sorghum in Africa. It is the only viable food grain for many of the world’s most food insecure people. Much of the African continent is characterized by semi-ar...

Sweetpotato (Ipomoeae batatas (L.) Lam.) is an important food crop affected by several pests throughout the world, especially in tropical, subtropical, and temperate regions. Although Japan is relatively free from many serious sweetpotato pests, some pests, especially soil-borne pathogens, viruses, and insects such as plant-parasitic nematodes and weevils, cause severe damage in Japan. In this ...