Bacterial community profiles within the water samples of leptospirosis outbreak areas.

Background: Leptospirosis is a water-related zoonotic disease. The disease is primarily transmitted from animals to humans through pathogenic bacteria in contaminated water and soil. Rivers have a critical role in transmissions, while co-infection potentials with other waterborne bacteria might increase the severity and death risk of the disease.

Evolutionarily labile dispersal behavior and discontinuous habitats enhance population differentiation in island versus continentally distributed swallows.

The causes of population divergence in vagile groups remain a paradox in evolutionary biology: dispersive species should be able to colonize new areas, a prerequisite for allopatric speciation, but dispersal also facilitates gene flow, which erodes population differentiation. Strong dispersal ability has been suggested to enhance divergence in patchy habitats and inhibit divergence in continuous landscapes, but empirical support for this hypothesis is lacking. Here we compared patterns of population divergence in a dispersive clade of swallows distributed across both patchy and continuous habitats.

A Multi-landscape Assessment of Leptospira Prevalence on a Diversity of Small Mammals.

Leptospirosis is a major zoonotic disease, especially in the tropics, and rodents were known to be carriers of this bacterium. There was established information on Leptospira prevalence among animal reservoirs in human-dominated landscapes from previous literature. However, there was very little focus given comparing the prevalence of Leptospira in a wide range of habitats.

Molecular Surveillance for Vector-Borne Bacteria in Rodents and Tree Shrews of Peninsular Malaysia Oil Palm Plantations.

Many human clinical cases attributed to vector-borne pathogens are underreported in Malaysia, especially in rural localities where healthcare infrastructures are lacking. Here, 217 small mammals, consisting of rodents and tree shrews, were trapped in oil palm plantations in the Peninsular Malaysia states of Johor and Perak. Species identification was performed using morphological and DNA barcoding analyses, and 203 small mammals were included in the detection of selected vector-borne bacteria.