A Case Series on Spotted Fever and Typhus Fever Seropositivity at National Center for Disease Control and Epidemiological Perspective.

The rickettsioses, except for typhus fever and scrub typhus (ST), were not really recognized as distinct clinical entities until the early 20th century. Only when specific rickettsial serologic testing was introduced in the 1940s could the precise etiologies of various rickettsial diseases (RDs) be determined with certainty. Although ST is a well- recognized zoonotic disease entity, but non-scrub typhus rickettsial infection like spotted fever group and typhus group are not well studied in India and are still underestimated.

Chronicle down memory lane: India's sixty years of plague experience.

Background: This perspective documents the historical aspects of outbreaks of plague of last six decades, establishment of plague surveillance network in India with detailed insights about its activities and recent developments requiring focus on plague surveillance. Human plague was reported in Mulbagal area of Karnataka in 1966-67 only to re-emerge in the country in 1994 in Beed district (Maharashtra) and subsequently in Surat (Gujarat). Later Plague outbreak has been reported in the year 2002 with index case from Village Hatkoti, Shimla District in Himachal Pradesh.

Green biomimetic preparation of efficient Ag-ZnO heterojunctions with excellent photocatalytic performance under solar light irradiation: a novel biogenic-deposition-precipitation approach.

Herein, we report a unique single-step biogenic deposition precipitation (BDP) approach as a straightforward route for producing efficient Schottky contact between noble metal nanoparticles and wide-band-gap semiconductors. Successful preparation of Ag-ZnO heterojunctions using fennel seed extract (FSE) has been described. The effective biomolecules available in the seeds functioned as novel biogenic materials for the precipitation of adsorbed silver ions (Ag) on ZnO particles as metallic silver (Ag).