Venkataramana Kandi

Department of Microbiology, Prathima Institute of Medical sciences, Karimnagar, Telangana, India
Author    Correspondence author
International Journal of Molecular Medical Science, 2015, Vol. 5, No. 3   doi: 10.5376/ijmms.2015.05.0003
Received: 21 May, 2015    Accepted: 03 Jun., 2015    Published: 18 Jun., 2015

This is an open access article published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Venkataramana Kandi, 2015, Recent Trends in Emerging and Re-emerging Microbial Infections: An Update on Scrub Typhus, International Journal of Molecular Medical Science, Vol.5, No.3, 1-6 (doi: 10.5376/ijmms.2015.05.0003)

In the era of emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases which has seen many endemics, epidemics and pandemics throughout the world attributed to viral, parasitic and bacterial microbes, preparedness assumes significance. Changing microbial behaviour due to genetic variations as seen in Influenza virus is responsible for emergence of newer strains which are antigenically different from the existing ones is responsible for infections that cause severe morbidity and mortality. Other microbial species including the Dengue virus, Chikungunya virus, Crimean Congo haemorrhagic fever virus transmitted to human through vectors, Listeria monocytogenes, Leptospira spp, Legionella pneumophila cause frequent endemics and epidemics worldwide. Emergence of multi-drug resistant species of Mycobacterium tuberculosis has already thrown a challenge for the control and eradication programmes against tuberculosis. Other bacterial species resistant to many antimicrobials currently being used owing to the genetic variations cause infections in human that are very difficult to treat. Scrub typhus is a unique disease caused by Orientia tsutsugamushi, an intracellular bacterium transmitted by the bite of chiggers (larval forms of mites) and is usually present endemically whose clinical features are very similar to other prevalent infectious diseases in the same geographical areas. The need of the hour is to have a good knowledge of microbial infections in respective geographic regions and predicting emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases which could contribute to better patient management.

Emerging infections; Re-emerging infections; Scrub Typhus; Orientia tsutsugamushi