Boostrom Ardys, Beier Magda S, Macaluso Jacqueline A, Macaluso Kevin R, Sprenger Daniel, Hayes Jack, Radulovic Suzana, Azad Abdu F
Corpus Christi-Nueces County Department of Public Health, Corpus Christi, Texas, USA.
Emerg Infect Dis. 2002 Jun;8(6):549-54. doi: 10.3201/eid0806.010350.
Application of molecular diagnostic technology in the past 10 years has resulted in the discovery of several new species of pathogenic rickettsiae, including Rickettsia felis. As more sequence information for rickettsial genes has become available, the data have been used to reclassify rickettsial species and to develop new diagnostic tools for analysis of mixed rickettsial pathogens. R. felis has been associated with opossums and their fleas in Texas and California. Because R. felis can cause human illness, we investigated the distribution dynamics in the murine typhus-endemic areas of these two states. The geographic distribution of R. felis-infected opossum populations in two well-established endemic foci overlaps with that of the reported human cases of murine typhus. Descriptive epidemiologic analysis of 1998 human cases in Corpus Christi, Texas, identified disease patterns consistent with studies done in the 1980s. A close geographic association of seropositive opossums (22% R. felis; 8% R. typhi) with human murine typhus cases was also observed.
在过去10年中，分子诊断技术的应用已促使发现了几种新的致病性立克次体物种，包括猫立克次体。随着立克次体基因的序列信息越来越多，这些数据已被用于对立克次体物种进行重新分类，并开发用于分析混合立克次体病原体的新诊断工具。猫立克次体已在得克萨斯州和加利福尼亚州与负鼠及其跳蚤相关联。由于猫立克次体可导致人类疾病，我们调查了这两个州鼠型斑疹伤寒流行地区的分布动态。在两个成熟的流行病灶中，感染猫立克次体的负鼠种群的地理分布与报告的人类鼠型斑疹伤寒病例的分布重叠。对得克萨斯州科珀斯克里斯蒂1998年人类病例的描述性流行病学分析确定了与20世纪80年代所做研究一致的疾病模式。还观察到血清反应阳性的负鼠（22%为猫立克次体；8%为伤寒立克次体）与人类鼠型斑疹伤寒病例在地理上密切相关。
