Microbial transmission through mucosal-mediated mechanisms is widespread throughout the animal kingdom. One example of this occurs with Hirudo verbana, the medicinal leech, where host attraction to shed conspecific mucus facilitates horizontal transmission of a predominant gut symbiont, the Gammaproteobacterium Aeromonas veronii. However, whether this mucus may harbor other bacteria has not bee...

Leech infestation is a very rare phenomenon in humans. It mostly occurs in humans when rural untreated water is drunk or while swimming in streams or lakes. When leeches adhere to the mucous membrane, they ingest blood. Thus, they can sometimes cause severe anemia that may require blood transfusion. We report a case that was referred to emergency service with bleeding in the floor of the mouth....

An important question that remains unanswered is how the vertebrate neuroimmune system can be both friend and foe to the damaged nervous tissue. Some of the difficulty in obtaining responses in mammals probably lies in the conflation in the central nervous system (CNS), of the innate and adaptive immune responses, which makes the vertebrate neuroimmune response quite complex and difficult to di...

Hematophagous animals including leeches have been known to possess biologically active compounds in their secretions, especially in their saliva. The blood-sucking annelids, leeches have been used for therapeutic purposes since the beginning of civilization. Ancient Egyptian, Indian, Greek and Arab physicians used leeches for a wide range of diseases starting from the conventional use for bleed...

The appearance and localization of acetylcholinesterase (AchE) were studied during embryonic development of the leech Helobdella triserialis. Use of a histochemical stain showed that AchE is present in the polar plasms of the uncleaved leech egg. in the course of the first two cleavages, the AchE is transmitted along with the polar plasms mainly to the D blastomere, precursor of mesoderm and ec...

In recent work it has been demonstrated by various scholars that the use of modal verbs has changed in past decades (Krug 2000, Leech 2003, Smith 2003, and especially Leech et al. 2009). In earlier work Close and Aarts (2010) and Aarts, Close and Wallis (forthcoming) looked at the changing use of the modal and semimodal auxiliaries in spoken English. While the results of these investigations ar...

A nine month old infant was taken to a rural medical center due to hematemesis and melena. The bleeding persisted in spite of active management with gastric lavage, intravenous cimetidine, antiacid therapy and blood transfusion for four days' duration. The patient was referred to our center for further evaluation and management. On arrival he was pale and ill looking with active bleeding fr...

We report here some results of a proteomic analysis of changes in protein expression in the leech Hirudo medicinalis in response to septic injury. Comparison of two-dimensional protein gels revealed several significant differences between normal and experimental tissues. One protein found to be up-regulated after septic shock was identified, through a combination of Edman degradation, mass spec...

BACKGROUND Leeches have gained a fearsome reputation by feeding externally on blood, often from human hosts. Orificial hirudiniasis is a condition in which a leech enters a body orifice, most often the nasopharyngeal region, but there are many cases of leeches infesting the eyes, urethra, vagina, or rectum. Several leech species particularly in Africa and Asia are well-known for their propensit...

Little is known about the prevalence and pathogenesis of trypanosomes in Australian monotremes, and few genetic characterisation studies have been conducted with these haemoparasites. During the present investigation, molecular and microscopic methods were used to screen peripheral blood (n=28) and ectoparasites (n=10 adult ticks; n=5 tick nymphs; n=1 leech; and n>500 tick eggs) collected from ...