While most mosquito-borne viruses are associated with a narrow range of vector and reservoir host species, some pathogens have much larger vector and host assemblages. One such group is the Alphaviruses (including chikungunya virus [CHIKV]), with Ross River virus (RRV), endemic to Australia, providing a fascinating example of the complicated relationship between vector and reservoir host specie...

Emerging zoonotic pathogens are a constant threat to human health throughout the world. Control strategies to protect public health regularly fail, due in part to the tendency to focus on a single host species assumed to be the primary reservoir for a pathogen. Here, we present evidence that a diverse set of species can play an important role in determining disease risk to humans using Lyme dis...

INTRODUCTION Bartonella species are fastidious Gram-negative bacteria that are highly adapted to a mammalian reservoir host and within which the bacteria usually cause a long-lasting intraerythrocytic bacteremia.1-3 These facts are of particular importance to veterinarians and physicians, as an increasing number of animal reservoir hosts have been identified for various Bartonella species. Amon...

By definition, zoonotic pathogens are not strict host-species specialists in that they infect humans and at least one nonhuman reservoir species. The majority of zoonotic pathogens infect and are amplified by multiple vertebrate species in nature, each of which has a quantitatively different impact on the distribution and abundance of the pathogen and thus on disease risk. Unfortunately, when n...

Ten species of freshwater molluscs were found in a malacological survey in the Sirikit reservoir in 1985. Among these species, Tricula aperta or Neotricula aperta, intermediate host of human schistosomes, Bithynia (Digoniostoma) siamensis goniomphalos and B. (D.) funiculata, the first intermediate host of Opisthorchis viverrini were not found. It is revealed that most of the habitats in the Sir...

Groups of chronically infected reservoir-hosts contaminate resource patches by shedding a parasite׳s free-living stage. Novel-host groups visit the same patches, where they are exposed to infection. We treat arrival at patches, levels of parasite deposition, and infection of the novel host as stochastic processes, and derive the expected time elapsing until a host-jump (initial infection of a n...

Background Novel pathogens can emerge into humans via one-step transmission from a reservoir host, an animal species in which the pathogen is maintained, or a two-step process in which the pathogen is transmitted from the reservoir host into a different amplification host species and thence to humans. Here we use serosurveillance and mathematical modeling to discover whether monkeys serve as re...

a novel gram-positive actinobacterium isolated from a human clinical source. Four-year prospective study of STAPH-IDENT system and conventional method for reference identification of Staphylococcus, Stomatococcus, and Micrococcus spp. Alvarez-Grande J. Relapsing bacteraemia due to Micrococcus luteus in a haemodialy-sis patient with a Perm-Cath catheter. To the Editor: Some 80% of parasitic infe...

Human babesiosis is an increasing health concern in the northeastern United States, where the causal agent, Babesia microti, is spread through the bite of infected Ixodes scapularis ticks. We sampled 10 mammal and 4 bird species within a vertebrate host community in southeastern New York to quantify reservoir competence (mean percentage of ticks infected by an individual host) using real-time P...

Due to novel, improved and high-throughput detection methods, there is a plethora of newly identified viruses within the genus Hantavirus. Furthermore, reservoir host species are increasingly recognized besides representatives of the order Rodentia, now including members of the mammalian orders Soricomorpha/Eulipotyphla and Chiroptera. Despite the great interest created by emerging zoonotic vir...