The established relationships among social determinants of health (SDH), health disparities, and race/ethnicity highlight the need for health-care professionals to adequately address SDH in their encounters with patients. The ethnic demographic transition slated to occur during the next several decades in the United States will have numerous effects on the health-care sector, particularly as it...

Most of the knowledge of the virulence determinants of extraintestinal pathogenic Escherichia coli (ExPEC) comes from studies with human strains causing urinary tract infections and neonatal meningitis and animal strains causing avian colibacillosis. In this research, we analyzed the phylogenetic background, the presence of 20 ExPEC virulence factors, and the intrinsic virulence potential of 74...

The relationship between parasite fitness and virulence has been the object of experimental and theoretical studies often with conflicting conclusions. Here, we provide direct experimental evidence that viral fitness and virulence, both measured in the same biological environment provided by host cells in culture, can be two unrelated traits. A biological clone of foot-and-mouth disease virus a...

The study of fungal regulatory networks is essential to the understanding of how these pathogens respond to host environmental signals with effective virulence-associated traits. In this study, a virulence-associated DEAD-box RNA helicase-encoding gene (VAD1) was isolated from a mutant defective in the virulence factor laccase. A Deltavad1 mutant exhibited a profound reduction in virulence in a...

Virulence traits are essential for pathogen fitness, but whether they affect microbial performance in the environment, where they are not needed, remains experimentally unconfirmed. We investigated this question with the facultative pathogen Listeria monocytogenes and its PrfA virulence regulon. PrfA-regulated genes are activated intracellularly (PrfA 'ON') but shut down outside the host (PrfA ...

Bacteria of Shigella spp. (S. boydii, S. dysenteriae, S. flexneri and S. sonnei) and enteroinvasive Escherichia coli (EIEC) are responsible for shigellosis in humans, a disease characterized by the destruction of the colonic mucosa that is induced upon bacterial invasion. Shigella spp. and EIEC strains contain a virulence plasmid of approximately 220 kb that encodes determinants for entry into ...

Two examples illustrate the use of locusts as models for the study of brain disease and behaviour. First, immune challenge induces sickness behaviour in locusts: immune challenge with laminarin induces anorexia, paralleling phenomena seen in other animals including mammals. Laminarin-induced anorexia in locusts can be blocked by Mianserin, suggesting the involvement of serotonergic receptors. S...

In the present study, we demonstrated the utility of the nonmammalian model system Galleria mellonella for studying the pathogenesis of Staphylococcus aureus infection. By use of clinical and laboratory strains that had been exposed to vancomycin, we showed that both agr functional status and vancomycin minimum inhibitory concentration are determinants associated with the virulence of S. aureus...

Pseudomonas aeruginosa is a multi-host opportunistic pathogen causing a wide range of diseases because of the armoury of virulence factors it produces, and it is difficult to eradicate because of its intrinsic resistance to antibiotics. Using an integrated whole-genome approach, we searched for P. aeruginosa virulence genes with multi-host relevance. We constructed a random library of 57 360 Tn...