Parasites, causing little apparent damage in feral fish populations, may become causative agents of diseases of great importance in farmed fish, leading to pathological changes, decrease of fitness or reduction of the market value of fish. Despite considerable progress in fish parasitology in the last decades, major gaps still exist in the knowledge of taxonomy, biology, epizootiology and contr...

Vampire bat populations were opportunely sampled before, during, and at varying intervals after outbreaks of bovine rabies. The captured bats were examined for rabies neutralizing antibody and virus. In all, sera from 1,024 vampire bats were tested for antibody, and tissues from these bats plus 83 others were tested for virus. Neutralizing antibody only rarely appeared in vampire serum samples ...

Hantaviruses are distributed throughout the United States and are the etiologic agents for hantavirus pulmonary syndrome and hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome. Hantavirus genotypes and epidemiologic patterns vary spatially across the United States. While several longitudinal studies have been performed in the western United States, little is known about the virus in the eastern United State...

Described is a computer software package, EPIZOO, which has been developed specifically for undergraduate and postgraduate education, self-training, problem-solving, and simulation studies in veterinary epidemiology. The program is based on action-oriented animal population health/disease analyses and programming. EPIZOO runs on IBM-compatible personal computers and can be used for any animal p...

Brucellosis is a common infection of feral swine throughout the United States. With the recent expansion of feral swine populations across the country, this disease poses an increasing threat to agriculture and hunters. The standard approach to Brucella surveillance in feral swine has been serological testing, which gives an indication of past exposure and is a rapid method of determining popul...

Toxoplasmosis is a globally distributed parasitic zoonosis. Cats and other Felidae are the definitive host of the Toxoplasma gondii parasite, in whose intestines the sexual cycle takes place, and they are the primary source of infection to all animals including humans, by way of contaminating the environment with oocysts excreted in the feces (Dubey, 2010). Herbivores are infected by ingestion ...

Bats are natural reservoirs of rabies. We address the maintenance of the disease in bat colonies by developing individual and population models that generate indicators of risk of rabies to bats, that provide dynamic estimates of effects of rabies on population densities, and that suggest consequences of viral exposures and infections in bats relative to physiological and ecological characteris...