Publications by authors named "Alice Bacon"
Outbreaks of suspected tick-borne disease (redwater fever) have been reported in captive deer of the Scottish Highlands. In this pilot study, polymerase chain reaction and amplicon sequencing were used to detect tick-borne pathogens in opportunistically collected blood and spleen samples from 63 (healthy, n = 44; diseased, n = 19) cervids, and 45 questing and feeding ticks () from the outbreak sites in 2021-2022. Potentially pathogenic species were detected in deer but not identified in ticks, was detected in both deer and ticks, and was detected in ticks but not in deer.
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- The Scottish population of the European wildcat is critically endangered and was declared functionally extinct in 2019 by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
- A study reviewed health issues and deaths in captive wildcats from 2000 to 2021, finding that most health problems affected younger cats, primarily related to gastrointestinal and musculoskeletal issues.
- Mortality was mostly linked to gastrointestinal and respiratory diseases, with a significant number of neonatal deaths highlighting ongoing challenges in managing the wildcat population's health and sustainability.
Most investigations on the immune cell-activating potency of IgA used purified total IgA and/or specific isolated cell populations. As IgA2 has been reported to be more pro-inflammatory than IgA1, we aimed to employ a fast and convenient whole blood-based assay to individually probe the capacity of the two IgA subclasses to activate immune cells in close physiological conditions. To this end, whole blood from healthy donors ( = 10) was stimulated with immobilized IgA1, IgA2m1 or IgA2m2 (the two main allotypic variants of IgA2).
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