Sexual transmission of Zika virus: a literature review.

Zika virus is an emerging health threat worldwide. A member of the yellow fever virus family, it is primarily spread by mosquitoes of the Aedes (Stegomyia) genus. Unusually for a mosquito-borne virus, sexual spread has also been reported; with cases of male-to-female, female-to-male and male-to-male sexual transmission all now published in the scientific literature, in both symptomatic and asymptomatic infection.

Multiple simultaneous infections in a patient with well-controlled HIV: when Occam's razor fails.

Multiple concurrent infectious processes have previously been reported in the context of advanced HIV with significant immunosuppression. Here we report a case of multiple infections in a 56-year-old man with well-controlled HIV diagnosed 5 years earlier. Soon after returning to Australia following 12 years living in Thailand, he became unwell with fevers, night sweats, arthralgia and myalgia.

Why doctors should care about animal cruelty.

Background: Animal cruelty is a significant problem for society, and there are good reasons why doctors should be particularly concerned by it. Increasing evidence for links between animal cruelty and child or spousal abuse is an area of growing concern internationally and of real importance to health professionals.

Objective: This article aims to raise awareness of the relevance of animal cruelty to medical practice.

The traditional categories of fluoroacetate poisoning signs and symptoms belie substantial underlying similarities.

Sodium monofluoroacetate (Compound 1080) has been widely used around the world as a vertebrate pest control agent. Following ingestion of 1080 there is a latent period, during which the compound is metabolised into a toxic form, before the onset of symptoms. The timing of this period varies significantly between species as does the median lethal dose.

Evolution of multi-resistance plasmids in Australian clinical isolates of Escherichia coli.

Plasmids allow the movement of genetic material, including antimicrobial resistance genes, between bacterial species and genera. They frequently mediate resistance to multiple antimicrobials and can result in the acquisition by a pathogen of resistance to all or most clinically relevant antimicrobials. Unfortunately, there are still large gaps in our understanding of how new multi-resistance plasmids evolve.

Species differences in plasmid carriage in the Enterobacteriaceae.

Modern concerns about the spread of antibiotic resistance raise questions about the effect of bacterial species on plasmid evolution and maintenance. We studied 223 Enterobacteriaceae isolated from wild mammals and determined the number of plasmids per isolate, the size of those plasmids, and the distribution of plasmid incompatibility groups N, P, W, FII, and A/C. All of these variables were non-randomly distributed with respect to bacterial species, suggesting that host-cell factors constrain the plasmids that a strain will carry.