[Boutonneuse fever and tourism].

In the last few years some cases of boutonneuse fever have been "imported" into Central and Northern European countries, where it was previously unknown, by tourists returning from African or Mediterranean countries where the disease is endemic. Data on the subject are summarised and the possibility of ticks carrying the disease being transported into disease-free countries is analysed. The results of a clinicoepidemiological survey on boutonneuse fever contracted by foreigners in areas where the disease is actively endemic are reported.

[Current endemic expansion of boutonneuse fever in Italy].

Cases of rickettsiosis of all kinds have reduced to mere sporadic episodes in the last thirty years all over the Mediterranean. But in the last five years, some regions of Italy (Lazio, Liguria, Sicily, Sardinia) have registered an extraordinary epidemiological event, the endemoepidemic expansion of boutonneuse fever which was previously only seen in about thirty cases a year. It is now on the increase and 864 cases were notified in 1979, but the real incidence of the disease is much greater.