Epidemic typhus rickettsiae isolated from flying squirrels

EPIDEMIC typhus is a severe rickettsial infection that classically has involved only man and his body louse. Although the aetiological agent, Rickettsia prowazekii , has been isolated from ticks of domestic animals and from blood of livestock in Ethiopia and Egypt 1,2 , infection of these unusual ho...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Nature (London) 1975-06, Vol.255 (5509), p.545-547
Main Authors: BOZEMAN, F. MARILYN, MASIELLO, STEVEN A, WILLIAMS, MICHAEL S, ELISBERG, BENNETT L
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Animals
Complement Fixation Tests
Disease Reservoirs
Humanities and Social Sciences
letter
multidisciplinary
Rickettsia prowazekii - classification
Rickettsia prowazekii - isolation & purification
Science
Science (multidisciplinary)
Sciuridae - microbiology
Serotyping
Virginia
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Summary:EPIDEMIC typhus is a severe rickettsial infection that classically has involved only man and his body louse. Although the aetiological agent, Rickettsia prowazekii , has been isolated from ticks of domestic animals and from blood of livestock in Ethiopia and Egypt 1,2 , infection of these unusual hosts and vectors has been thought to be secondary to active dissemination of the louse-borne disease in the human population 3 . Ormsbee concluded that livestock and the equivalent wild species were unlikely to be important in the ecology of epidemic typhus 4 . This disease was last reported in the eastern United States in Philadelphia in 1836 (ref. 5). We have now isolated six strains of R. prowazekii from the eastern flying squirrel ( Glaucomys volans volans ). This finding suggests that an extrahuman reservoir of epidemic typhus can exist in a species of wild rodent independent of the recent occurrence of epidemic or sporadic disease.
ISSN:0028-0836
1476-4687
DOI:10.1038/255545a0