During the past ten years, several new hepatitis E viruses (HEVs) have been identified in various animal species. In parallel, the number of reports of autochthonous hepatitis E in Western countries has increased as well, raising the question of what role these possible animal reservoirs play in human infections. The aim of this review is to present the recent discoveries of animal HEVs and thei...

Many intracellular microbial symbionts of arthropods are strictly vertically transmitted and manipulate their host's reproduction in ways that enhance their own transmission. Rare horizontal transmission events are nonetheless necessary for symbiont spread to novel host lineages. Horizontal transmission has been mostly inferred from phylogenetic studies but the mechanisms of spread are still la...

Correspondence and reprint requests should be addressed to: Dr. Leanne E. Unicomb Head, Water and Sanitation Cluster Programme on Infectious Diseases and Vaccine Sciences Health Systems and Infectious Diseases Division ICDDR,B GPO Box 128, Dhaka 1000 Bangladesh Email: [email protected] Fax: +880-2-8811568 Improvements in food safety require initiatives that address risks identified along the ‘f...

Design and analysis of routing protocols are the key issues for a mobile ad hoc network (MANET). The Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) protocol is one of the important on-demand routing protocols. In this paper, we develop a comprehensive analytic model for the performance study of the DSR protocol with multiple routes. Two performance metrics, called probability of a successful data transmission an...

Health care associated infections are infections that patients acquire, while they are in contact with the healthcare system. Contact includes all procedures associated with diagnostics, treatment, care, and rehabilitation. Health care associated infections were formerly called hospital or nosocomial infections. Hospitals still account for the vast majority of cases; however, for practical reas...

Heterogeneity in the number of potentially infectious contacts amongst members of a population increases the basic reproduction ratio (R(0)) and markedly alters disease dynamics compared to traditional mean-field models. Most models describing transmission on contact networks only account for one specific route of transmission. However, for many infectious diseases multiple routes of transmissi...

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the discovery of gas and oil in Central Asia and Caucasia, it faced complex interests in the international political economy. These problems were mainly rooted in developing plans of the countries for increasing their influence in the area and also in Russia's connections with the Iranian and Turkish governments in the region. This paper investigat...

Transmission of ovine progressive pneumonia virus (OPPV), a lentivirus of sheep, occurs through both maternal and non-maternal means. Currently, the contribution of each route to the overall flock OPPV prevalence is poorly understood since previous serological epidemiologic studies lacked the ability to accurately track routes of transmission within an infected flock. In this study, the amount ...

Across animals and plants, numerous metabolic and defensive adaptations are a direct consequence of symbiotic associations with beneficial microbes. Explaining how these partnerships are maintained through evolutionary time remains one of the central challenges within the field of symbiosis research. While genome erosion and co-cladogenesis with the host are well-established features of symbion...