The study was carried out in the central part of the Islamic Republic of Iran over a 12-month period in 1991-92 in Borkhar, a rural district lying north of Isfahan city. The objective was to determine the ecology of natural reservoir hosts of leishmaniasis for possible future field trials of leishmania vaccine. The main reservoir host in this area is Rhombomys opimus, the great gerbil, followed...

BACKGROUND Zoonotic cutaneous leishmaniasis (ZCL) due to Leishmania major is increasing in many parts of Iran. This disease originally is a disease found in gerbils. Leishmania parasites are transmitted by sandflies that live and breed in gerbil burrows. Nested PCR amplified Leishmania ITS1-5.8S rRNA gene in both main reservoir host "Rhombomys opimus" and in the "Phlebotomus papatasi" main vect...

background: zoonotic cutaneous leishmaniasis (zcl) is an increasing public health problem in some endemic re­gions. horseradish peroxidase (hrp) conjugated rabbit anti- rhombomys opimus ( r. opimus ) ig is needed for im­munoblotting and elisa tests used to explore the immune response of the rodents against the sand fly saliva. in this study, the production of hrp conjugated rabbit anti- r. opim...

INTRODUCTION The wildlife plague system in the Pre-Balkhash desert of Kazakhstan has been a subject of study for many years. Much progress has been made in generating a method of predicting outbreaks of the disease (infection by the gram negative bacterium Yersinia pestis) but existing methods are not yet accurate enough to inform public health planning. The present study aimed to identify char...

background: ectoparasites of mammalian hosts play an important role for transmission of diseases from the host res­ervoirs to human. the aim of this study was to determine the species composition and infestation parameters for para­sitic arthropods associated with rhombomys opimus. methods: ectoparasites of r. opimus were collected from seven endemic district of zcl in iran including shirvan an...

In central Asia, the great gerbil (Rhombomys opimus) is the main host for the bacterium Yersinia pestis, the cause of bubonic plague. In order to prevent plague outbreaks, monitoring of the great gerbil has been carried out in Kazakhstan since the late 1940s. We use the resulting data to demonstrate that climate forcing synchronizes the dynamics of gerbils over large geographical areas. As it i...

1School of Public Health and Institute of Public Health Research; 2Isfahan Training and Health Research Centre; 4Bandar Abbas Training and Health Research Centre; 5Yazd Training and Health Research Centre; Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Islamic Republic of Iran. 3Department of Public Health, Sabzevar University of Medical Sciences, Sabzevar, Islamic Republic of Iran. ABSTRACT An...

Great gerbils (Rhombomys opimus) are the most common gerbils in center to northeast of Iran as well as central Asia and serve as reservoirs for the zoonotic agents, including Leishmania major, the principal etiologic agent of zoonotic cutaneous leishmaniasis (ZCL). The outcome of L. major infection in gerbils is not uniform. Among several immune-related factors including cytokine genes, the pol...