Swine play an important role in the disease ecology of influenza. Having cellular receptors in common with birds and humans, swine provide opportunities for mixed infections and potential for genetic reassortment between avian, human, and porcine influenza. Feral swine populations are rapidly expanding in both numbers and range and are increasingly coming into contact with waterfowl, humans, an...

Background and aims: Cats carry a lot of zoonotic parasites such as Toxoplasma gondii (T. gondii) which causes toxoplasmosis in warm-blooded animals. Toxoplasmosis includes wide range of symptoms in its intermediate and definitive hosts but the worst symptoms have been seen in pregnant women and also on immunocompromised hosts. Considering the importance of the fact that cats are as the only de...

Although raccoons (Procyon lotor) are susceptible to influenza viruses, highly pathogenic avian influenza virus (H5N1) infection in these animals has not been reported. We performed a serosurvey of apparently healthy feral raccoons in Japan and found specific antibodies to subtype H5N1 viruses. Feral raccoons may pose a risk to farms and public health.

We investigated involvement of feral swine in contamination of agricultural fields and surface waterways with Escherichia coli O157:H7 after a nationwide outbreak traced to bagged spinach from California. Isolates from feral swine, cattle, surface water, sediment, and soil at 1 ranch were matched to the outbreak strain.

Perennial grasses are promising candidates for bioenergy crops, but species that can escape cultivation and establish self-sustaining naturalized populations (feral) may have the potential to become invasive. Fertile Miscanthus × giganteus, known as "PowerCane," is a new potential biofuel crop. Its parent species are ornamental, non-native Miscanthus species that establish feral populations and...

OBJECTIVE To predict effectiveness of 3 interventional methods of population control for feral cat colonies. DESIGN Population model. SAMPLE Estimates of vital data for feral cats. PROCEDURES Data were gathered from the literature regarding the demography and mating behavior of feral cats. An individual-based stochastic simulation model was developed to evaluate the effectiveness of trap-...

804 BioScience • October 2013 / Vol. 63 No. 10 www.biosciencemag.org Islands harbor a disproportionate amount of Earth’s biodiversity and are characterized by the presence of a great number of endemic plant and animal species (MacArthur and Wilson 1967, Carlquist 1974, Myers et al. 2000, Kier et al. 2009). Invasive predator species, parti­ cularly mammals, are one of the primary extinction driv...

INTRODUCTION Anti-carbamylated protein (anti-CarP) antibodies have been described in rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and arthralgia patients at risk of developing RA. To what extent these autoantibodies are specific for RA is unknown. Therefore, we investigated the diagnostic performance of the presence of anti-CarP antibodies for RA in a setting of early arthritis. METHODS Anti-CarP antibodies wer...

Two species of common edible fish, common carp (Cyprinus carpio) and silver carp (Hypophthalmichthys molitrix), were exposed to a Microcystis spp.-dominated natural cyanobacterial water bloom for two months (concentrations of cyanobacterial toxin microcystin, 182-539 microg/g biomass dry wt). Toxins accumulated up to 1.4 to 29 ng/g fresh weight and 3.3 to 19 ng/g in the muscle of silver carp an...

The effect of adding protein xanthophyll from lucerne (PX) on growth parameters and the redox profile of carp muscle Cyprinus carpio (L.) was studied. During a 10-week experiment, carp were kept in two types of tanks: Control, where fish were fed a commercial fish feed, and in experimental tanks (PX+), where the fish were fed the same fish feed with a 5% addition protein xanthophyll from lucern...