Introduction Feline upper respiratory infection (URI) is perhaps the most frustrating illness facing shelter veterinarians, managers and staff, and has been identified as the number one disease concern for cats in shelters and after adoption[1, 2]. Many cats enter shelters already silently carrying the viruses that lead to illness; vaccines are partially effective at best; and specific treatmen...

ference featured 8 speakers and 35 poster presentations.) opened the conference with a presentation on the search for the origins of HIV. The evidence indicates that two simian immu-nodeficiency viruses (SIV), one from chimpanzees (SIVcpz) and the other from sooty mangabeys (SIVsm), crossed the species barrier to humans, generating HIV-1 and HIV-2, respectively. Dr. Hahn stressed the importance...

The anatomic pathologist performs an important role in the diagnosis or exclusion of infectious diseases. The morphologic interpretation of biopsies and cytologic preparations allows for the definitive establishment or exclusion of a wide variety of diseases. Once the pathologist has determined that a disease is likely to be due to an infection and has characterized the inflammatory response, a...

Background: The mortality rate of sepsis and pneumonia is higher in end-stage renal disease (ESRD) patients than in the general population. Bacterial infections are the most common cause of hospitalization in dialysis patients and the most common source of bacteremia is vascular access in these patients. The aim of this study was to determine the prevalence of infectious causes of hospitalizati...

With the recent advances in molecular biology and genetics over the past several decades, we have grad-ually uncovered the elusive cause of some of the malignant diseases that have been, and continue to be, a major factor in human mortality. Infectious disease agents, so ubiquitous in our environment, have now become the most credible link in our search for the cause of cancer. The number of ma...

This book devotes chapters to the usual infectious disease suspects and surveillance concepts and systems. I will not go into details of its contents and glowing attributes; the publisher (www.blackwellpublishing.com/ book.asp?ref=9781405142663) and reviewers (1,2) have done a good job on this. Instead, I conducted a simple review to try and answer the following question: compared with a free I...

This is an author-created preprint of a book chapter to appear in the Handbook on Spatial Epidemiology edited by Andrew Lawson, Sudipto Banerjee, Robert Haining and Lola Ugarte, CRC Press. The final version of this text is to be found in this book – once available the ISBN number of the book will be given. The preprint is available as http://www.math.su.se/~hoehle/pubs/Hoehle_ SpaMethInfEpiMode...

infectious diseases constitute a tenacious and major public-health problem all over the world. although some, such as smallpox and poliomyelitis, have been eradicated from nature or almost wiped out, many diseases persist with little or no hope of getting them under control. in addition, new infectious diseases are emerging and old ones that were thought to be under control are regaining lost g...

Glycosaminoglycans (GAGs) are complex carbohydrates that are ubiquitously present on the cell surface and in the extracellular matrix. Interactions between GAGs and pathogens represent the first line of contact between pathogen and host cell and are crucial to a pathogen's invasive potential. Their complexity and structural diversity allow GAGs to control a wide array of biological interactions...

BACKGROUND Increasing volumes of data and computational capacity afford unprecedented opportunities to scale up infectious disease (ID) mapping for public health uses. Whilst a large number of IDs show global spatial variation, comprehensive knowledge of these geographic patterns is poor. Here we use an objective method to prioritise mapping efforts to begin to address the large deficit in glob...