Once away from home, travelers are especially vulnerable to food-borne illness since with regard to food, they rely on the sourcing, processing, and culinary skills of others. Toxic syndromes due to food poisoning may occur after ingestion of foods that…
Entamoeba histolytica and Giardia lamblia are the most common protozoan pathogens of the human intestinal tract worldwide. In the United States, infections caused by Giardia and Cryptosporidium are most prevalent. Giardia and E. histolytica infection rates are significantly higher in…
Gastrointestinal infections are the most common illnesses in travelers, occurring in 34% of all travelers, typically those traveling from high-income countries to low and middle-income countries. Traveler's diarrhea (TD) is defined as three or more unformed stools per day and…
Health threats to travelers from infectious disease are common, with estimates of up to 75% of travelers becoming ill at some time during their travel. The World Health Organization (WHO) cites an extensive list ( ) of potential infectious…
International travel often brings us into contact with multidrug-resistant (MDR) organisms (MRDOs), especially bacteria. These germs may or may not colonize or infect the traveler, but when they do, they present challenges to the clinician. This chapter will focus on…
Hemorrhagic Fevers Overview and Transmission Hemorrhagic fevers are caused by infection with single-stranded, small RNA viruses in the Arenaviridae, Filoviridae, Bunyaviridae, or Flaviviridae families ( Table 28.1 ). The clinical picture is usually one of hemodynamic instability and coagulation abnormalities…
Human African trypanosomiasis (HAT), or African sleeping sickness, is a parasitic infection caused by the flagellated protozoa of the Trypanosoma brucei complex, which is spread by the tsetse fly. Sleeping sickness occurs in more than 30 countries in Africa, putting…
Chagas disease, first described in , is endemic throughout Central and South America. An estimated 8 million people are infected with Trypanosoma cruzi , the etiologic agent of this disease. T. cruzi , a protozoan of the order Kinetoplastida, has…
Approximately 2 billion people, one-third of the world's population, are infected with Mycobacterium tuberculosis , and the majority of burden is in developing countries. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that the annual incidence of active tuberculosis (TB) cases was…
In 1977, Steere and co-workers reported on an epidemic of arthritis in the region of Old Lyme, Connecticut. This breakthrough work catalyzed a flurry of studies that soon described Ixodes ticks as the vector, identified the spirochete Borrelia burgdorferi as…