BACKGROUND Toxoplasma gondii infection is mainly caused by ingestion of water or food that is contaminated with oocysts excreted by cats, or by eating raw meat containing T. gondii tissue cysts. However, oral transmission does not explain the common occurrence of toxoplasmosis in a variety of hosts, such as herbivorous animals, birds, and wild rodents. Little information exists on the maintenan...

Dear Editor: With great interest, I have gone through the paper titled, “Prevalence of tick-borne encephalitis virus in ixodid ticks collected from the Republic of Korea during 2011‒2012,” by Yun et al [1]. Yun et al [1] reported that the minimum infection rate (MIR) of tick-borne encephalitis (TBE) from a tick was 0.08%. The MIR from Haemaphysalis longicornis, a tick species that constitutes m...

Antimicrobial peptides are major components of host innate immunity, a well-conserved, evolutionarily ancient defensive mechanism. Infectious disease-bearing vector ticks are thought to possess specific defense molecules against the transmitted pathogens that have been acquired during their evolution. We found in the tick Haemaphysalis longicornis a novel parasiticidal peptide named longicin th...

Severe tick infestation was found in a hare in a suburban area of Nanchang, Jiangxi Province, China. We sampled ticks and identified them based on their morphologic characteristics. Three species, Ixodes sinensis, which is commonly found in China and can experimentally transmit Borrelia burgdorferi, Rhipicephalus haemaphysaloides, and Haemaphysalis longicornis which can transmit Lyme disease we...

Ectoparasitic arthropods are often vectors of rickettsiosis. We conducted a survey of ectoparasites on U.S. military facilities throughout Japan with the use of specimens submitted by pest control, public health, and veterinary personnel. Over 1,600 individual ectoparasites were collected. Fifteen species were identified, including several significant vectors of human diseases such as scrub typ...

Babesiosis caused by Babesia microti parasite is an emerging tick borne zoonotic disease that was confirmed recently in China. To understand the epidemiology characteristics of this emerging disease, infectivity of B. microti to domestic animals and ticks outside the genus Ixodes was evaluated in this study. Different domestic animals, chick, pig, goat, dog and the reference host rat were exper...