Domestic dogs are mammalian reservoirs for the emerging zoonosis flea-borne spotted fever, caused by Rickettsia felis
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Hii, Sze-Fui
Hoang, Minh-Trang Thi
Nguyen, Van-Anh Thi
Rees, Robert
Stenos, John
Traub, Rebecca Justine
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Abstract
Rickettsia felis is an obligate intracellular bacterium that is being increasingly recognized as an etiological agent of human rickettsial disease globally. The agent is transmitted through the bite of an infected vector, the cat flea, Ctenocephalides felis, however there is to date, no consensus on the pathogen's vertebrate reservoir, required for the maintenance of this agent in nature. This study for the first time, demonstrates the role of the domestic dog (Canis familiaris) as a vertebrate reservoir of R. felis. The ability of dogs to sustain prolonged periods of rickettsemia, ability to remain asymptomatically infected with normal haematological parameters and ability to act as biological vehicles for the horizontal transmission of R. felis between infected and uninfected fleas provides indication of their status as a mammalian reservoir of this emerging zoonosis.
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Scientific Reports
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10
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1
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© The Author(s) 2020. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
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Zoology
Veterinary bacteriology
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Ng-Nguyen, D; Hii, S-F; Hoang, M-TT; Nguyen, V-AT; Rees, R; Stenos, J; Traub, RJ, Domestic dogs are mammalian reservoirs for the emerging zoonosis flea-borne spotted fever, caused by Rickettsia felis, Scientific Reports, 2020, 10 (1), pp. 4151