Presentations at the 9th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections, held in Seattle, February 24 to 28, 2002, continued to shed light on the complex interactions between HIV and the immune system. Major topics of discussion included natural hosts of simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) infection, the dynamics of T lymphocytes, the myriad mechanisms utilized by HIV to avoid host imm...

I. Introduction Mutualistic associations between eukaryotic hosts and their microbial partners have long been an interest of ecologists and evolutionary biologists due to the importance of understanding phylogenetic congruence, coevolution, host specificity, infectivity, and maintaining the precarious balance between pathogenicity and innocuousness. Each partner has an important function in the...

Ebola and other filoviruses pose significant public health and conservation threats by causing high mortality in primates, including humans. Preventing future outbreaks of ebolavirus depends on identifying wildlife reservoirs, but extraordinarily high biodiversity of potential hosts in temporally dynamic environments of equatorial Africa contributes to sporadic, unpredictable outbreaks that hav...

Field studies have shown that native, parasitic plants grow vigorously on invasive plants and can cause more damage to invasive plants than native plants. However, no empirical test has been conducted and the mechanism is still unknown. We conducted a completely randomized greenhouse experiment using 3 congeneric pairs of exotic, invasive and native, non-invasive herbaceous plant species to qua...

  Abstract   Strongyloidiasis is caused by infestation with Strongyloides stercoralis, a free   living tropical and semitropical soil helminth that has a larval form that penetrates   intact skin. Clinical manifestations may be varied from an asymptomatic infection   in immunocompetent hosts to a diffuse and fatal form in immunocompromised   hosts.   We report a 56-year-old man from Dezful (sou...

The main purpose of this paper has been to discuss the effects of psychological stress and other environmental factors on incidence of diseases. We were specifically concerned with stress that increased susceptibility of uninfected hosts when exposed to infection. If such stresses also reduced resources, fecundity and/or survivorship, there was a reduction in the host carrying capacity. In addi...

We describe cervids as potential reservoir hosts of Babesia EU1 and B. divergens. Both babesial parasites were found in roe deer. Sequence analysis of 18S rRNA showed 99.7% identity of roe deer Babesia EU1 with the human EU1 strain. B. divergens detected in cervids was 99.6% identical to bovine B. divergens.

Most of the efforts on the search and characterization of Earth-like exoplanets are currently focused on low mass stars. These represent the vast majority of the population in our galaxy (about 75% of the stars have a lower mass than the Sun) and their interest lies in the fact that the photometric and spectroscopic signal of orbiting Earth-like planets is higher due to lower star-planet size a...