Search results for "Opportunistic"
showing 10 items of 96 documents
Host immune response to Cryptosporidium parvum infection
2010
Species of the genus Cryptosporidium are protozoan parasites (Apicomplexa) that cause gastroenteritis in animals and humans. Of these Cryptosporidium parvum and Cryptosporidium hominis are the major causative agents of human cryptosporidiosis. Whereas infection is self-limiting in the immunocompetent hosts, immunocompromised individuals develop a chronic, life-threatening disease. As specific therapeutic or preventive interventions are not yet available, better understanding of the immune response to the parasite is required. This minireview briefly summarizes the factors involved in the innate and acquired immune response in this pathogen-host interaction with an emphasis on more recent da…
Vibrio vulnificus biotype 2, pathogenic for eels, is also an opportunistic pathogen for humans
1996
We report that the eel pathogen Vibrio vulnificus biotype 2 is also an opportunistic pathogen for humans. Results from a detailed comparative study using reference strains of both biotypes revealed that the clinical strain ATCC 33817, originally isolated from a human leg wound and classified as V. vulnificus (no reference on its biotype is noted), belongs to biotype 2 of the species. As a biotype 2 strain, it is negative for indole and pathogenic for eels and mice, harbors two plasmids of high MrS, and belongs to serogroup E, recently proposed as characteristic of biotype 2 strains. In consequence, appropriate measures must be taken by consumers, particularly by those running a health risk,…
[Norovirus infections: an overview]
2010
National audience; Noroviruses belong to the Caliciviridae family. They are a major cause of sporadic cases and outbreaks of gastroenteritis in all age groups, and are responsible for a considerable disease burden in industrialized countries. Noroviruses are single-stranded RNA viruses, and show great genetic diversity making their detection difficult. Noroviruses can be divided into 5 genogroups, which themselves are subdivided into genotypes. Besides chance mutations that occur during viral replication, the great heterogeneity observed among noroviruses is also due to intra and inter-genotypic recombination events between strains. Some of these new variants or new recombinants are frequen…
New technologies can support data collection on endangered shark species in the Mediterranean Sea
2022
In the last 50 yr, shark populations showed steep declines in the Mediterranean Sea. The IUCN lists most Mediterranean species as threatened (55%), while considering 27.5% of them Data Deficient. Here, sharks are currently one of the rarest and more elusive groups of animals, and data from fisheries and scientific monitoring still insufficiently support robust abundance and distribution assessments. New technologies can fill this data gap by linking people and scientists through new monitoring strategies. SharkPulse, an international collaborative project, aims at creating a large world database of shark occurrence records by mining images on the web, social networks, and private archives. …
The influence of infective dose, nutrient availability and coinfection on virulence of Flavobacterium columnare : implications of intensive aquacultu…
2016
Ecological factors are known to affect disease dynamics and even lead to disease emergence. Especially in opportunistic, environmentally transmitted pathogens, the environment may significantly contribute to pathogen virulence. Intensive farming, including aquaculture, has been suggested to create conditions favouring development of highly virulent pathogens. At Finnish fish farms, epidemics caused by opportunistic Flavobacterium columnare have been constantly increasing in their prevalence and severity since the 1980’s. Yet, factors behind the increased virulence of the pathogen and their mechanisms of action have largely remained unsolved. In this thesis, I explore the effects of infectio…
Reflecting on the PRET A Rapporter Framework Via a Field Study of Adolescents’ Perceptions of Technology and Exercise
2013
PRET A Rapporter (PRETAR) was developed to explicitly structure user-centered evaluation studies to ensure all necessary elements are individually and independently considered. Its creators see its benefit as twofold: for study design and in retrospective evaluations. We evaluate PRETAR’s potential by applying it retrospectively to one of our eHealth field studies in which we investigated the design requirements for mobile technologies that would support and motivate adolescents to exercise opportunistically. We also use PRETAR to evaluate the key literature for this eHealth study. This shows that typically the research methodology is under-reported. Then we document the study in terms of i…
Data from: Broad thermal tolerance is negatively correlated with virulence in an opportunistic bacterial pathogen
2018
Predicting the effects of global increase in temperatures on disease virulence is challenging, especially for environmental opportunistic bacteria, because pathogen fitness may be differentially affected by temperature within and outside host environment. So far, there is very little empirical evidence on the connections between optimal temperature range and virulence in environmentally growing pathogens. Here we explored if the virulence of an environmentally growing opportunistic fish pathogen, Flavobacterium columnare, is malleable to evolutionary changes via correlated selection on thermal tolerance. To this end, we experimentally quantified the thermal performance curves (TPCs) for max…
Toxoplasmosis after hematopoietic stem transplantation. Report of a 5-year survey from the Infectious Diseases Working Party of the European Group fo…
2000
Toxoplasmosis after hematopoietic stem transplantation. Report of a 5-year survey from the Infectious Diseases Working Party of the European Group for Blood and Marrow Transplantation
Diagnosis of invasive fungal infections in hematology and oncology
2003
Invasive fungal infections are a primary cause of morbidity and mortality in patients with hematological malignancies. Establishing a definite diagnosis of invasive fungal infection in febrile neutropenic patients is particularly challenging and time-consuming, but a delay of antifungal treatment leads to higher mortality. This situation has lead to the strategy of initiation "empirical" antifungal therapy prior to the detection of fungi. Meanwhile, improvements in diagnostic procedures are achieved, especially with imaging techniques and non-culture based methods which include antigen-based assays, metabolite detection and molecular detection of fungal DNA from body fluid samples using con…
Clinical and microbiological diagnosis of oral candidiasis
2013
Introduction: Candidiasis or oral candidiasis is the most frequent mucocutaneous mycosis of the oral cavity. It is produced by the genus Candida, which is found in the oral cavity of 53% of the general population as a common commensal organism. One hundred and fifty species have been isolated in the oral cavity, and 80% of the isolates correspond to Candida albicans, which can colonize the oral cavity alone or in combination with other species. Transformation from commensal organism to pathogen depends on the intervention of different predisposing factors that modify the microenvironment of the oral cavity and favor the appearance of opportunistic infection. The present study offers a liter…