Leptospirosis is an infectious disease of public health importance. To successfully colonize the host, pathogens have evolved multiple strategies to escape the complement system. Here we demonstrate that the culture supernatant of pathogenic but not saprophytic Leptospira inhibit the three complement pathways. We showed that the proteolytic activity in the supernatants of pathogenic strains tar...

Leptospirosis in horses has been considered a relatively uncommon infection. However, recent data suggest that the infection is widespread, with the incidence and infecting serovars varying considerably in different geographical regions. The majority of infections remain asymptomatic. Clinical signs in equine leptospirosis resemble those seen in other animal species. However, leptospirosis as a...

OBJECTIVES To determine the leptospirosis seroprevalence and to identify the predominant infecting serovars among oil palm plantation workers. METHODS The cross-sectional study involved 350 asymptomatic oil palm plantation workers in Melaka and Johor. A serological test using the microscopic agglutination test was conducted in the Institute of Medical Research with a cut-off titre for seropos...

AIM To determine the possibility of leptospirosis among patients from urban slums presenting with febrile illness during monsoon and post-monsoon season. METHODS Evidence of leptospirosis in 180 patients with febrile illness was determined by looking for presence of immunoglobulin M (IgM) antibodies by leptospiral IgM enzyme linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). The test was carried out on 160 ...

Soon after the discovery of the causal organism of Weil's disease by Inada and Ido (1915), the proof was forthcoming that rats which harbour the organism in their kidneys are responsible for the dissemination of the disease. The presence of natural leptospiral infection in wild rats was first recognized by Miyajima in Japan [Walch-Sorgdrager (1939) ]. Since then it has been found to exist in ma...

Currently available diagnostic assays for leptospirosis cannot differentiate vaccine from infection serum antibody. Several leptospiral proteins that are upregulated during infection have been described, but their utility as a diagnostic marker is still unclear. In this study, we undertook a lipidomics approach to determine if there are any differences in the serum lipid profiles of horses natu...

The family of leptospiral immunoglobulin-like (lig) genes comprises ligA, ligB and ligC. This study used PCR to demonstrate the presence of lig genes among serovars from a collection of leptospiral strains and clinical isolates. Whilst ligA and ligC appeared to be present in a limited number of pathogenic serovars, the ligB gene was distributed ubiquitously among all pathogenic strains. None of...

In April 1931, we were informed by the authorities of the Alipuram Jail, Bellary, of the prevalence at the time of an epidemic of jaundice in the jail population there. An Investigation Unit of the Institute under the charge of one of us (R. S. R.) was therefore sent there to study the nature of the infection and to ascertain particularly if it was of leptospiral origin, as amongst the jail pop...

Leptospira, the causative agent of leptospirosis, interacts with several host molecules, including extracellular matrix components, coagulation cascade proteins, and human complement regulators. Here we demonstrate that acquisition of factor H (FH) on the Leptospira surface is crucial for bacterial survival in the serum and that these spirochetes, besides interacting with FH, FH related-1, and ...

In the past decade, leptospirosis has emerged as a globally important infectious disease. It occurs in urban environments of industrialised and developing countries, as well as in rural regions worldwide. Mortality remains significant, related both to delays in diagnosis due to lack of infrastructure and adequate clinical suspicion, and to other poorly understood reasons that may include inhere...