Cryptosporidiosis, a zoonotic diarrheal disease, significantly contributes to the mortality of people with impaired immune systems worldwide. Infections with an animal-adapted genotype (Genotype 2) of Cryptosporidium parvum were found in a human population in Uganda that shares habitats with free-ranging gorillas, from which the same genotype of C. parvum had been recovered previously. A high p...

A 19-year-old male residing in Pittsburgh presented with irritation and watering from his right eye and was diagnosed to have a right subconjunctival nodule. Surgical excision revealed both dead and living worms and histopathological staining of the worms confirmed these to be zoonotic species of Onchocerca. The morphologic characteristics of the worm suggest it to be either O. lupi or O. liena...

Hantaviruses cause 2 zoonotic diseases, hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome (HFRS) and hantavirus cardiopulmonary syndrome. Infection is usually initiated after inhalation of virus-contaminated rodent excreta. In addition to the zoonotic infection route, growing evidence suggests person-to-person transmission of Andes virus. For this reason, we studied whether saliva from HFRS patients contai...

To shed light on the epidemiology of ascariasis in Ecuador and Zanzibar, 177 adult worms retrieved by chemo-expulsion from either people or pigs were collected, measured and subjected to polymerase chain reaction-restriction fragment length polymorphism (PCR-RFLP) analysis of the ribosomal internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region. Upon double digestion with RsaI and HaeIII, PCR-RFLP analysis re...

The 2009 H1N1 pandemic emphasized a need to evaluate zoonotic transmission of influenza A in swine production. Airborne influenza A virus has been detected in swine facilities during an outbreak. However, the personal exposure of veterinarians treating infected swine has not been characterized. Two personal bioaerosol samplers, the NIOSH bioaerosol sampler and the personal high-flow inhalable s...

Preventing emergence of new zoonotic viruses depends on understanding determinants for human risk. Nipah virus (NiV) is a lethal zoonotic pathogen that has spilled over from bats into human populations, with limited person-to-person transmission. We examined ecologic and human behavioral drivers of geographic variation for risk of NiV infection in Bangladesh. We visited 60 villages during 2011-...

As the threat of a pandemic looms, improvement in our understanding of interspecies transmission of influenza is necessary. Using the search terms "swine," "influenza," and "human," we searched the PubMed database in April 2006 to identify publications describing symptomatic infections of humans with influenza viruses of swine origin. From these reports, we extracted data regarding demographic ...

Hepatitis E virus (HEV) causes self-limiting acute hepatitis in humans that can eventually result in acute liver failures or progress to chronic infections. While in tropical and sub-tropical areas, HEV infections are associated with important waterborne epidemics, in Northern countries, HEV infections are autochthonous with a zoonotic origin. In the past decade, it has become clear that certai...

The role of rodents in the epidemiology of zoonotic hepatitis E virus (HEV) infection has been a subject of considerable debate. Seroprevalence studies suggest widespread HEV infection in commensal Rattus spp. rats, but experimental transmission has been largely unsuccessful and recovery of zoonotic genotype 3 HEV RNA from wild Rattus spp. rats has never been confirmed. We surveyed R. rattus an...

BACKGROUND Disease transmission patterns are needed to inform public health interventions, but remain largely unknown for avian influenza H5N1 virus infections. A recent study on the 139 outbreaks detected in Indonesia between 2005 and 2009 found that the type of exposure to sources of H5N1 virus for both the index case and their household members impacted the risk of additional cases in the ho...