Melioidosis is an endemic disease in Southeast Asia and northern Australia. An increasing number of cases are being reported in nonendemic countries, making the diagnosis less obvious. We discuss the identification of Burkholderia pseudomallei using matrix-assisted desorption ionization-time of flight mass spectrometry on the occasion of recent cases of imported melioidosis in French travellers.

Florida’s mild, sub-tropical climate has long received praise as delightful and healthful. However, it also fostered tuberculosis, malaria, and other endemic tropical diseases, for which there was no known cure in the nineteenth century. Periodic visitations of dreaded epidemic diseases added to the health hazard. Indeed, prior to the twentieth century, certain diseases affected the pattern of ...

Pemphigus foliaceus (PF) is an autoimmune blistering disease presenting in endemic and sporadic forms. The typical presentation is recurrent shallow erosions in a seborrheic distribution. PF has also been found in association with autoimmune diseases such as autoimmune thyroid disease (e.g. toxic nodular goiter and Hashimoto’s thyroiditis). In some patients, PF appears to be triggered by radioi...

Surveillance is a continuous and systematic process of collection, consolidation, analysis, interpretation and dissemination of relevant information on the occurrence of health problems. Data from surveillance can be used to calculate the incidence and prevalence of events, to categorise disease distribution by relevant characteristics, to guide investigations into the occurrence of epidemic an...

Animal Health Surveillance is the systematic collection, collation, analysis interpretation, and dissemination of animal health and welfare data from defined populations. This process is essentially about gathering intelligence to detect either novel animal health-related events or increases in animal health-related events as early as possible to better inform risk management at all levels with...

Can leprosy be eliminated? This paper considers the question against the background of the WHO programme to eliminate leprosy. In 1991 the World Health Assembly set a target of eliminating leprosy as a public health problem by 2000. Elimination was defined as reaching a prevalence of < 1 case per 10 000 people. The elimination programme has been successful in delivering highly effective antibio...

The paper describes the specifics of the epidemiology of the Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome (PRRS), that is its "behavior" as a communicable disease in porcine populations, and compares them to the general epidemiological characteristics of communicable diseases. This analysis shows that infection with the PRRS virus "behaves" epidemiologically both as an epidemic and as an endem...

Individuals in human and animal populations are linked through dynamic contact networks with characteristic structural features that drive the epidemiology of directly transmissible infectious diseases. Using animal movement data from the British cattle industry as an example, this analysis explores whether disease dynamics can be altered by placing targeted restrictions on contact formation to...

OBJECTIVE Lack of knowledge is one of the factors responsible for the persistence of infectious diseases in Brazil. This study had the objective of developing, implementing and evaluating a low-cost educational program using schistosomiasis patients as a model. METHODS This was a descriptive study developed using a population of healthy people (group 1) and schistosomiasis patients (groups 2 ...

Hydatididosis is an endemic disease in Iraq till now and it causes highly economic looses. The aim of the following study was to investigate the pathological effect of hydatid cyst on kidney function. 11% total percentage was recorded among kidney of experimentally infected male mice with hydatid cyst in the current study and many pathological changes were also reported. The present study has e...