The objectives of the current study were to assess the prevalence of Cytauxzoon felis infection among a population of domestic cats that were clinically healthy but at higher risk for parasite exposure and to determine if the strains present in these asymptomatically infected cats were genetically unique as compared to those present both in domestic cats that were fatally infected and in the na...

To the Editor: Mediannikov et al. recently reported several features common to the epidemiology of Rickettsia felis infection and malaria in Africa (1). Similar to the findings of several other recent studies in Africa (2,3), the authors diagnosed R. felis infection in febrile—and to a lesser extent in afebrile—persons by detecting R. felis DNA in human blood samples processed by highly sensiti...

Crucial factors influencing the epidemiology of Rickettsia felis rickettsiosis include pathogenesis and transmission. Detection of R. felis DNA in a number of arthropod species has been reported, with characterized isolates, R. felis strain LSU and strain LSU-Lb, generated from the cat flea, Ctenocephalides felis, and the non-hematophagous booklouse, Liposcelis bostrychophila, respectively. Whi...

Fleas were collected from 61 wild carnivores belonging to 13 species in various nature reserves and on farms, two feral domestic cats in a nature reserve and a domestic dog in the city of Johannesburg. Eleven flea species, including two subspecies of one of these, belonging to six genera were recovered. Amongst these only Ctenocephalides felis felis and Ctenocephalides felis strongylus are cons...

Rickettsia felis is an emerging zoonosis, causing flea-borne spotted fever (FBSF). Serological diagnosis is typically confounded by cross-reactivity with typhus group rickettsiae and prior to the development of specific serological methods, cases of FBSF in Australia were misdiagnosed. Patient sera tested between August 2010 and December 2013 and known to be seropositive to R. typhi by immunofl...

The flea-borne rickettsioses murine typhus (Rickettsia typhi) and flea-borne spotted fever (FBSF) (Rickettsia felis) are febrile diseases distributed among humans worldwide. Murine typhus has been known to be endemic to Kenya since the 1950s, but FBSF was only recently documented in northeastern (2010) and western (2012) Kenya. To characterize the potential exposure of humans in Kenya to flea-b...

Bartonella sp. and Rickettsia DNA were detected in cat fleas, Ctenocephalides felis (Bouché), collected from urban, client-owned cats (Felis catus L.) dogs (Canis lupus familiaris at Tulsa, OK, during 2017. henselae (Regnery et al. 1992) was four of six fleas (67%) one cat, while (Bouyer 2001) eight five animals.

tional Center for Biotechnology Information basic local alignment sequence tool, BLAST (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ blast/Blast.cgi). To determine whether R. felis occurs on another Caribbean island, we tested 32 C. felis fl eas from Dominica and found 1 (3%) to be positive by PCR when primers targeting ompA were used. The sequence obtained was also identical to that of R. felis URRxCal2. Our study p...