s of the Fifth International Conference on Tularemia; Woods Hole (MA); 2006 Nov 1–4. [Abstract 210A]. 10. Seabra J, Santos MA, Pereira H, Vicente P, Vasconcelos O, Santo A, et al.Prevalence of Francisella tularensis antibodies in the population of North of Portugal. In: Abstracts of the Prevention and Control of Zoonoses; Cardiff, Wales, UK; 2002 Oct 21–23. Cardiff (Wales); Health Protectio...

Twenty-five years ago, the development of molecular biology and recombinant DNA technology promised breakthroughs in infectious disease research. Since then, these methods have slowly teased out molecular secrets of microbial infection, gene by gene. Now, with the advent of whole-genome sequencing, a new revolution in infectious disease research has begun. Genomics is a top-down approach to the...

Address for correspondence: Andreas J. Bäumler, Department of Medical Microbiology and Immunology, Texas A&M University, 407 Reynolds Medical Building, College Station, TX 77843-1114; fax: (979) 845-3479; e-mail: [email protected]. The avian-adapted serovar Salmonella Gallinarum, which includes two biovars, Gallinarum and Pullorum, was endemic in poultry flocks in Europe and the Americas in the ...

Transmission of Lassa virus (family Arenaviridae) from its natural rodent reservoir to humans can cause hemorrhagic fever, a clinical syndrome associated with high death rates. Lassa fever is endemic in West Africa and has been reported from Sierra Leone, Guinea, Liberia, and Nigeria (1-4). The geographically restricted occurrence of the disease is not well understood as its rodent host (Mastom...

The spectrum of human pathogens and the infectious diseases they cause is continuously changing through evolution and changes in the way human populations interact with their environment and each other. New human pathogens most often emerge from an animal reservoir, emphasizing the central role that non-human reservoirs play in human infectious diseases. Pathogens may also re-emerge with new ch...

Perhaps no other field of research has been more energized by the application of genomic technology than the field of microbiology. Five years ago, The Institute for Genomic Research published the first complete genome sequence for a free-living organism, Haemophilus influenzae (1). Since then, 27 more microbial genome sequences (2-28) and 3 lower eukaryotic chromosome sequences (29-31) have be...

Human population growth, technological advances, and changing social behaviors lead to the selection of new microbial pathogens. Antimicrobial drugs, vaccines, diagnostics, and treatments for emerging infectious diseases must be developed. The selective forces that drive the emergence of new infectious diseases, and the implications for our survival, are just beginning to be understood.

Forty years ago is not ancient history in the medical field. However, being an eye witness to the emergence of three new infectious diseases in the northeastern United States in the 1970s left a deep impression on this author. I will relate a small portion of the amazing events that caught the attention of the medical establishment and the general public in a roughly 5-year period of medical di...

Over the last two decades, there has been the emergence of previously unknown infectious diseases and the re-emergence of diseases thought to be in decline. This is the result of social, economic, political and ecological factors, and the interactions of organisms, hosts and the environment. In recent years, Australia has experienced a number of significant outbreaks of emerging diseases such a...