The cattle tick, Rhipicephalus microplus, has a debilitating effect on the livestock industry worldwide, owing to its being a vector of the causative agents of bovine babesiosis and anaplasmosis. In South Africa, co-infestation with R. microplus and R. decoloratus, a common vector species on local livestock, occurs widely in the northern and eastern parts of the country. An alternative to chemi...

Ixodes scapularis ticks are implicated in transmission of Anaplasma phagocytophilum, Borrelia burgdorferi, Borrelia miyamotoi, Babesia microti, and Powassan virus. We describe the establishment and implementation of the first multiplex real-time PCR assay with the capability to simultaneously detect and differentiate all five pathogens in a single reaction. The application of this assay for ana...

Q1: In this patient’s clinical context, how do you interpret the laboratory tests on admission (table 1; see p 566) and those done between days 2–4 (table 2; see p 566)? This patient had a subacute febrile illness with constitutional symptoms and progressive jaundice. Initial laboratory tests showed severe anaemia with an increased reticulocyte count (corrected for the degree of anaemia) and re...

In Canada, the western blacklegged tick, Ixodes pacificus and the blacklegged tick, Ixodes scapularis, are the principal vectors of Borrelia burgdorferi, the causative agent of Lyme borreliosis. These two tick species are also capable of transmitting Babesia microti, the pathogen which causes human babesiosis, although locally acquired cases have yet to be reported in Canada. At the present tim...

Q1: In this patient’s clinical context, how do you interpret the laboratory tests on admission (table 1; see p 566) and those done between days 2–4 (table 2; see p 566)? This patient had a subacute febrile illness with constitutional symptoms and progressive jaundice. Initial laboratory tests showed severe anaemia with an increased reticulocyte count (corrected for the degree of anaemia) and re...

Babesiosis is a tick-transmitted disease of mammalian hosts, caused by the intraerythrocytic protozoan parasites of the genus Babesia. Transmission of Babesia parasites from the vertebrate host to the tick is mediated by sexual stages, the gametocytes which are the only intraerythrocytic stages that survive and develop inside the vector. Very few data are available concerning these parasite sta...

The U.S. lineage, one of the major clades in the Babesia microti group, is known as a causal agent of human babesiosis mostly in the northeastern and upper midwestern United States. This lineage, however, also is distributed throughout the temperate zone of Eurasia with several reported human cases, although convincing evidence of the identity of the specific vector(s) in this area is lacking. ...

Canine babesiosis is a tickborne, protozoal, haemoparasitic disease. Babesia organisms are frequently classified as either large (B. canis) or small gibsoni). The aim of this study was an attempt to detect B. gibsoni DNA in blood samples taken from dogs suspected suffering tick-borne diseases. 216 were tested using PCR, which, 99 them canisDNA detected, whereas 3 detected. Positive PCR results ...

Data collected on both free-living and parasitic tick populations are likely to be overdispersed. The use of means from few replicate samples of overdispersed data as quantitative estimators of tick population density is in turn likely to lead to inaccurate interpretations which may be scientifically misleading. In this paper ways of estimating overdispersion are listed and suggestions for the ...