Road-killed mammals provide insight into tick-borne bacterial pathogen communities within urban habitats

Transboundary and Emerging Diseases
Sándor SzekeresGábor Földvári

Abstract

Small- and medium-sized mammals play an important role in the life cycle of tick-borne pathogens in urban habitats. Our aim was to apply the general protocol, DAMA (documentation-assessment-monitoring-action), which is an integrated proposal to build a proactive capacity to understand, anticipate, and respond to the outcomes of accelerating environmental change. Here we tested whether road-killed carcasses in urban areas are useful sources of tissue and parasite samples to investigate these species' contribution to the epidemiology of vector-borne diseases. We collected 29 road-killed and 6 carcasses with different causes of mortality (23 northern white-breasted hedgehogs and 12 from seven other mammal species) mainly from Budapest, Hungary. We used quantitative and conventional PCRs to determine pathogens in 90 collected tissues (52 from hedgehogs; 38 from other species) and 417 ticks that were only found on hedgehogs. Tissue samples revealed a wide range of bacteria including human zoonotic pathogens identified as Anaplasma phagocytophilum ecotype I, Borrelia afzelii, B. spielmanii, Borrelia miyamotoi, Rickettsia helvetica, and Bartonella species. Among the 23 collected hedgehog carcasses, 17 (74%) were infected with A. phago...Continue Reading

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Citations

Jun 30, 2019·Parasites & Vectors·Ryanne I JaarsmaAgustín Estrada-Peña
May 9, 2019·Euro Surveillance : Bulletin Européen Sur Les Maladies Transmissibles = European Communicable Disease Bulletin·Sally CutlerHervé Zeller
Feb 7, 2021·Microbial Ecology·Paulina Maria LesiczkaDavid Modrý
Feb 3, 2021·Transboundary and Emerging Diseases·Daniel R BrooksValeria Trivellone
Jul 3, 2021·Pathogens·Karolina MajerováJan Votýpka
Jul 3, 2021·Animals : an Open Access Journal From MDPI·Jakub J RuszkowskiMałgorzata Pomorska-Mól

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