All 250 children presenting with diarrhoea at 2 teaching hospitals in Mosul, Iraq over a 9-month period were studied for the presence of Yersinia spp. in stools by cold-enrichment culture at 4 degrees C for 21 days. Pathogenicity of the isolated Yersinia was determined. Antibodies to Y. enterocolitica were raised for rapid Yersinia detection in the stool. Yersinia spp. were isolated from the st...

Using an inhibition enzyme linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) the serum antibody responses against released proteins of yersinia of molecular weights 26 and 46 kilodaltons were studied in 37 patients with and in 21 patients without reactive arthritis following yersinia infection. Although no difference was seen for the 46 kilodalton released protein, patients with yersinia triggered reactive ar...

To study phage-mediated gene transfer in Yersinia, the ability of Yersinia phages to transduce naturally occurring plasmids was investigated. The transduction experiments were performed with a temperate phage isolated from a pathogenic Yersinia enterocolitica strain and phage mixtures isolated from sewage. Small plasmids (4.3 and 5.8 kb) were transduced at a frequency of 10(-5) to 10(-7)/PFU. H...

Brown rats (Rattus norvegicus) have been identified as potential carriers of Yersinia enterocolitica and Y. pseudotuberculosis, the etiological agents of yersiniosis, the third most reported bacterial zoonosis in Europe. Enteropathogenic Yersinia spp. are most often isolated from rats during yersiniosis cases in animals and humans, and from rats inhabiting farms and slaughterhouses. Information...

Bayesian analysis was used to estimate the pig's and herd's true prevalence of enteropathogenic Yersinia in serum samples collected from Finnish pig farms. The sensitivity and specificity of the diagnostic test were also estimated for the commercially available ELISA which is used for antibody detection against enteropathogenic Yersinia. The Bayesian analysis was performed in two steps; the fir...

Lymphocyte transformation responses were studied in 21 patients with acute yersinia infection followed-up after the acute infection for up to one year. Eight patients had reactive arthritis caused by yersinia. The responses to the causative serotype of yersinia were significantly lower (p less than 0.05) in patients with arthritis than in those without arthritis. Stimulation with Escherichia co...

Yersinia specific immune complexes were demonstrated in the synovial fluid of three patients out of 12 with yersinia triggered reactive arthritis. They were not detectable in the synovial fluid of any of the 16 control patients, including nine with reactive arthritis triggered by factors other than yersiniae. Platelet reactive IgG was detectable in the synovial fluid of eight out of the 12 pati...

Three different Yersinia enterocolitica serotype O8 strains harboring mutations in virulence-associated genes coding for Yersinia adhesin A (YadA), Mn-cofactored superoxide dismutase (SodA), and high-molecular-weight protein 1 were analyzed for their ability to colonize and persist in tissues after orogastric immunization of C57BL/6 mice. We demonstrated that all three Yersinia mutant strains w...

........................................................................................... 5 PAPERS IN THIS THESIS.................................................................... 6 INTRODUCTION .................................................................................. 7 Yersinia spp. and their diseases..............................................................................7 P...