Tick-borne encephalitis virus (TBEV) is a zoonotic flavivirus of growing concern within the One Health framework, as its transmission cycle intricately links wildlife, domestic animals, vectors, and human populations. Its circulation is highly focal, depending on competent tick vectors and reservoir hosts in defined natural foci that can remain stable over decades.
In this study, residual...
The German Federal Office of Consumer Protection and Food Safety (BVL) is a national risk management authority. BVL fulfils many tasks in the area of food safety. Aims of BVL are transparent risk communication and crisis prevention including early warning in the field of food safety. Since 2015, one of the means for reaching BVL´s goals is BeoWarn, a systematic process that watches different...
Sleep is a fundamental pillar of health, with a profound impact on mental health and well-being. Yet, the biological mechanisms underlying this universal need remain elusive. We are currently exposed to a wide range of physical (e.g., elevated temperatures, air/noise/light pollution, traffic), social (e.g., socioeconomic disparity, work-related stress, social jet lag and shift work, digital...
Norway rats (Rattus norvegicus) are synanthropic rodents associated with a wide variety of pathogens. In Iran, limited information exists on the prevalence and diversity of zoonotic pathogens in commensal rodents. In this study, approximately 100 wild Norway rats from the capital Tehran were screened by RT-PCR and PCR assays for the presence of various bacterial and viral agents.
Five...
West Nile Virus (WNV), a zoonotic arbovirus with a mosquito-bird transmission cycle, can lead to severe disease in birds and dead-end hosts such as horses and humans. Its distribution has increased worldwide and the reported WNV cases in 2024 in birds and horses even exceeded the previous years. Recently we described the pathogenesis of WNV lineage 2 in-vivo in geese, showing in particular the...
Conventional workflows for viral genome reconstruction commonly rely on reference-based reconstruction methods. To generate an accurate consensus sequence, these workflows require a reference genome closely related to the target viral strain.
Recent evolutionary processes of the human metapneumovirus (hMPV) include long segmental duplications (DUPs) of over 100 nucleotides in the attachment...
Urban areas are becoming increasingly vulnerable to the effects of climate change, particularly through altered microclimatic conditions. As part of the Climate Future Labs initiative at the Lower Saxony Centre for Climate Research (ZKfN), the UMEX-HOPE project investigates the links between urban microclimates, ecosystem dynamics, and human health within a One Health framework. It aims to...
A growing number of countries face the threat of climate change driven by infectious diseases. The World Health Organization advocates for the One Health approach, which links human, animal and environmental health to enhance surveillance and disease control strategies. In response, a new module for digital environmental surveillance has been developed in SORMAS.
SORMAS is an open-source...
Thermotolerant Campylobacter spp. are the leading cause of foodborne bacterial diarrhoea in Europe. Here we analysed caecal and faecal samples (n=672) from 564 freshly hunted wild animals for Campylobacter spp.. A mean prevalence of C. spp. of 77.4% in wild boar (Sus scrofa) and 9.4% in roe deer (Capreolus capreolus) was detected, while C. spp. were absent in red deer (Cervus elaphus,...
Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever (CCHF) is a tick-borne viral zoonotic disease that pose a growing public health concern. It is primarily maintained and transmitted by Hyalomma ticks, with livestock such as dromedary camels (Camelus dromedarius) acting as amplifying hosts. In Nigeria, human infections with CCHFV are rarely reported, reflecting limited surveillance and gaps in understanding its...
Peatlands are wetland ecosystems that store 44% of terrestrial carbon due to their ability to accumulate organic matter. However, 15% of peatlands worldwide are drained or degraded, threatening the stability of carbon stocks and other ecosystem services that depend on water-saturated conditions. Rewetting peatlands is therefore a key climate mitigation measure. Nevertheless, wet peatlands...
Biting midges of the genus Culicoides are vectors of economically important livestock arboviruses, including bluetongue virus (BTV) and Schmallenberg virus (SBV). Repeated outbreaks of bluetongue disease and ongoing SBV circulation in Central Europe highlight the need for long-term surveillance. To address this, a Germany-wide monitoring programme was conducted on livestock farms, collecting...
Rinderpest virus (RPV; Morbillivirus pecoris) and measles virus (MeV; Morbillivirus hominis) are RNA viruses that belong to the Paramyxoviridae family which have had a major impact on livestock and human health. RPV caused the death of billions of cattle, with fatality rates reaching up to 90%, until its eradication in 2011. MeV causes measles in humans; a disease that, despite the...
Borna Disease Virus 1 (BoDV 1) is a zoonotic and neurotropic virus that causes fatal non-suppurative encephalitis in humans, horses, sheep, and alpacas. The white-toothed shrew (Crocidura leucodon) has been identified as a natural reservoir host, harboring a persistent infection without developing neurological impairments. For infection studies, the adult rat serves as a suitable model for...
The Lyon IARC polyomavirus (LIPyV), discovered in 2017, was detected as the fourteenth human polyomavirus in saliva and skin samples of healthy individuals (Kamminga et al. 2023). LIPyV exhibits a transforming effect on human primary cells, suggesting potential oncogenic properties (Venuti et al. 2022). LIPyV has also been detected in fecal samples from cats suffering from diarrhea (Li et al....
West Nile virus (WNV) is a mosquito-borne arbovirus endemic in Berlin since 2018, that replicates in an enzootic cycle between Culex pipiens and birds as reservoir hosts. Little is known of Culex pipiens host feeding preference in urban areas, especially with respect to the bird species acting as the main amplification host(s) for WNV.
To gain insight into host feeding preferences, the...
Globalization as well as climatic and environmental changes support the global spread of vectors and vector-borne diseases. Europe has recently been facing a rise in mosquito-borne diseases, following improving conditions for both mosquitoes and mosquito-borne pathogens. To monitor the circulation of mosquito-borne disease agents, zoos and wildlife parks have increasingly been recognized as...
Viruses infecting humans can not only be found in the human body, but in a range of environmental samples from our surroundings. This includes indoor surfaces such as handrails or door handles, air within closed spaces, or sewage. While quantitative detection of viral pathogens in such samples is established for decades, the comprehensive exploration of the genomic therein is a much more...
The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic highlighted the importance of how continuous molecular monitoring remains pivotal for enabling public health interventions. The integrated genomic surveillance (IGS) aims to provide a system in Germany to support both federal and local health authorities across multiple groups of public health relevant pathogens. To address this bioinformatically, we have developed a...
Mycobacterium avium subsp. paratuberculosis (MAP) is suspected to play a role in Crohn's Disease in humans, a gastrointestinal inflammation similar to paratuberculosis (PTB) in animals. Our reports that over 40% of patients with gastrointestinal disease complaints in the Sudan were positive for MAP and that the disease is present in all ruminant animals raised questions about the possible...
Rodents and other small mammals are key reservoirs for numerous pathogens, including zoonotic agents transmissible to humans, animal pathogens as well as infectious agents specific to small mammals. The transmission dynamics of these pathogens are shaped by complex biotic and abiotic environmental factors and reservoir functions such as genetics, necessitating a holistic, interdisciplinary...
Background:
Despite their significant public health relevance, the epidemiological links between environmental Legionella sources and human infections remain poorly defined. This is due to limited strain-level resolution in standard detection methods and a lack of harmonized genomic surveillance data across environmental compartments. With climate change promoting conditions conducive to...
Background: Nontyphoidal Salmonella causes more than 1.2 million annual deaths worldwide, the majority in resource-limited countries such as sub-Saharan Africa. Nontyphoidal Salmonella have also become increasingly resistant to antibiotics and are the most frequent cause of bacteraemia in sub-Saharan Africa. Recent data suggests that this typically livestock- associated pathogen has...
Broadly utilized in bacterial pathogen surveillance, enabling infection chain and outbreak investigations, are clustering approaches that employ core genome multi-locus sequence typing (cgMLST) to define pairwise genetic distances.
For the Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex (MTBC), structural variants (SVs), particularly regions of difference (RDs), which are large-scale insertions and...
The rapid evolution of respiratory viruses is characterized by the emergence of variants with concerning phenotypes that are efficient in antibody escape or show high transmissibility. This necessitates timely identification of such variants by surveillance networks to assist public health interventions.
Here we introduce VirusWarn, a comprehensive system designed for detecting,...
Dengue virus (DENV) is a significant public health concern in Côte d'Ivoire, reflecting broader trends across West Africa. Despite the clear public health burden, the true extent and diversity of DENV strains circulating in Côte d'Ivoire remain poorly characterized due to insufficient diagnostic capacity and a lack of genomic data. Understanding the genomic diversity of Dengue virus is crucial...
Classical Brucella are host-adapted, zoonotic pathogens that replicate within macrophages of their hosts. Recently, atypical Brucella strains have been isolated from rodents, amphibians and soil. These Brucella isolates are genetically more similar to environmental Ochrobactrum spp., raising questions about their niches and zoonotic potential. This study explores whether free-living...
Introduction
The environment influences tick density and activity. We investigated the effect of varying buffers around the residential address on the association between impervious density and Borrelia burgdorferi s.l. seropositivity in NAKO (German National Cohort) participants.
Methods
We included 14,195 participants from four NAKO study centers. Impervious density was...
Neuroborreliosis (NB), the most severe Lyme borreliosis form, is linked to Borrelia garinii and B. bavariensis. However, it is unclear if all genotypes cause disease. The database for Borrelia multilocus sequence typing (MLST) shows a higher diversity of sequence types (STs) in ticks than in humans, suggesting that not all STs cause symptoms. Our study explores Borrelia prevalence,...
Genomic surveillance is crucial for monitoring pathogens of public health significance, focusing on the detection of changes in the pathogens’ genomes, such as new mutations and variants. Prompt detection assists outbreak analytics while revealing variants with increased transmissibility or virulence. The COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the necessity for high-quality genome sequences for...
Influenza viruses (FLUV) pose a significant threat to global health and require comprehensive surveillance approaches. Although wastewater-based surveillance (WBS) has proven valuable for pathogen monitoring at the community level, its application to FLUV remains methodologically under-explored.
We evaluated the performance of various method combinations that included virus concentration and...
Mosquitoes of the Culex pipiens complex are relevant vectors of West Nile Virus, which has been locally detected in Germany since 2018. Environmental changes, including land-use modifications and climate change, may influence genetic and morphometric traits of mosquito populations, potentially affecting their fitness and vector competence.
This study examines association between...
Climate change affects the distribution of vector-borne diseases. Orthonairoviruses are significant tick-borne pathogens affecting both humans and livestock. Serosurveillance is a critical tool for indirect detection of virus circulation, and has traditionally focused on anti-nucleoprotein (N) antibodies. However, the close antigenic relationship among orthonairoviruses N proteins often causes...
The incidence of mosquito-borne diseases is projected to rise across Europe in the context of climate change, as increasing temperatures, altered precipitation patterns, and changes in land use support the expansion of potential vector species. Urban climate adaptation measures like green spaces and water bodies may unintentionally affect mosquito distribution. Here we present findings of...
Borna disease virus 1 (BoDV1) is a neurotropic virus that leads to a fatal non suppurative meningoencephalitis in humans and other dead-end hosts like sheep and horses and a persistent symptomless infection in its reservoir host, the bicolored white toothed shrew (Crocidura leucodon). The olfactory epithelium is an ideal entry point for neurotropic infections due to the direct connection of...
IGS is an effective public health strategy for the surveillance of infectious pathogens. It combines whole-genome sequencing of notifiable pathogens and subsequent bioinformatics analyses with epidemiological case data from the reporting system and further laboratory analysis data.
One of the IGS's primary objectives is to rapidly identify significant pathogen dissemination and to ascertain...
This study presents a statistical and machine learning analysis of breast cancer data from 213 patients treated at the University of Calabar Teaching Hospital between January 2019 and August 2021. The dataset comprises key demographic and clinical variables, including age, menopause status, tumor size, invasive lymph nodes, metastasis, breast quadrant, personal/family history of breast...
Ticks are recognized as potential vectors of Coxiella burnetii, a gram-negative, obligate intracellular bacterium and the causative agent of Q fever, a zoonotic disease affecting humans and a wide range of animals. This study aimed to assess the seroprevalence of Q fever in ruminants and the relationship between various farm management practices and the tick prevalence in livestock of four...
Background: The identification and engagement of the key stakeholders is required to address One Health challenges.
Methods: Net-map tool was used to map and analyze the institutions linkage to assess their suitability to support One Health initialization in Libya.
Results: The key stakeholders were identified and categorized to build a strong collaboration to ensure a...
The rate at which novel mammalian adenoviruses have been discovered has rapidly increased in recent years. However, there is still limited information regarding the diversity of adenoviruses in marine mammals. In this study, we used pan-adenovirus family primers targeting the DNA polymerase to perform PCRs on tissue samples originating from harbor and grey seals that were found stranded or...
Mosquito-borne viruses such as Rift Valley fever virus (RVFV) and Chikungunya virus (CHIKV) cause significant global morbidity and mortality. Transmission via mosquito bite exacerbates disease severity, likely through immunomodulatory components of saliva. To facilitate mechanistic studies under physiologically relevant conditions and reduce reliance on animal models, we established a human...
Pre-mRNA splice site selection and regulation critically depends on RNA-binding proteins, particularly members of SR and hnRNP families, which recognize splicing regulatory elements (SREs) near splice sites in a position-dependent manner. Of the Influenza A virus (IAV) segmented genome, segment 7 and 8 use the host splicing machinery to generate transcript variants through alternative...
Tick-borne encephalitis virus (TBEV) is not only transmitted by ticks but also via contaminated dairy products—a route that remains underappreciated despite its public health relevance. We explored how milk shapes viral survival in the digestive tract using simulated gastrointestinal conditions. Although milk can preserve TBEV infectivity at low temperatures, it acts very differently in the...
Schmallenberg virus (SBV) and bluetongue virus (BTV) are transmitted by Culicoides biting midges and affect ruminants. SBV was first found in Germany in 2011 and has today reached an enzootic status in central Europe. In 2006 BTV was introduced in central Europe and several serotypes has emerged ever since. In 2023 BTV-3 was detected for the first time in the Netherlands, rapidly spread to...
