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...

AIM The spatial structure of a population can strongly influence the dynamics of infectious diseases, yet rarely is the underlying structure quantified. A case in point is plague, an infectious zoonotic disease caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis. Plague dynamics within the Central Asian desert plague focus have been extensively modelled in recent years, but always with strong uniformity as...

b a ckground: zoonotic cutaneous leishmaniasis is a growing health problem in many rural areas of iran. rhombo mys opimus , the great gerbil, is the main animal reservoir of zcl in the northeast and central part of iran. the aim of the current study was to evaluate the rodenticidal effect of coumavec® (a mixture of coumatetralyl 0.5% and etofenprox 0.5%) on r. opimus under laboratory condition....

during our study (summer of 1994) twenty two tatera indica were collected and two out of them (9.09%) were naturally infected with amastigote. parasites were cultured in nnn+lit medium and isolated promastigotes were sent to the medical university of montpellier in france for identification. the result of isoenzyme showed, the parasite was leishmania major zymodem mon 26-(=lon 1), therefore tat...

The study is the first attempt to generalize data on burrow biocenoses of great gerbil (Rhombomys opimus (Lichtenstein, 1823)) in region persistent plague epizootics lowland part Karakum Desert (Southern Turkmenistan). material was collected May, November, and December 1987–1988 using trapping cylinders residential non-residential colonies gerbil. Coleoptera made up about 40% species compositio...

A polycephalic larva of Taeniidae family isolated from abdominal cavity of a great gerbil (Rhombomys opimus) from Golestan province, northern Iran, was subjected to molecular analysis. Genomic DNA from the larva was obtained using a DNA extraction tissue kit. Polymerase chain reaction was performed for amplification of the partial 12S rRNA, cytochrome c oxidase subunit 1 (cox1...