Find information on thousands of medical conditions and prescription drugs.

Ehrlichiosis

Ehrlichiosis is also refered to as canine rickettsiosis, canine hemorrhagic fever, canine typhus, tracker dog disease, and tropical canine pancytopenia. It is a tick-borne disease of dogs that is caused by the organism Ehrlichia. Dogs, cats, and in rare instances, humans are affected. German Shepherd dogs are known to be particularly affected by the disease. more...

Home

Diseases

Ebola hemorrhagic fever

Ehlers-Danlos syndrome

Ellis-Van Creveld syndrome

Emetophobia

Emphysema

Encephalitis

Encephalitis lethargica

Encephalocele

Encephalomyelitis

Encephalomyelitis, Myalgic

Endocarditis

Endocarditis, infective

Endometriosis

Endomyocardial fibrosis

Enetophobia

Enterobiasis

Eosinophilia-myalgia...

Eosinophilic fasciitis

Eosophobia

Ependymoma

Epicondylitis

Epidermolysis bullosa

Epidermolytic hyperkeratosis

Epididymitis

Epilepsy

Epiphyseal stippling...

Epistaxiophobia

EPP (erythropoietic...

Epstein barr virus...

Essential hypertension

Essential thrombocythemia

Essential thrombocytopenia

Essential thrombocytosis

Exploding head syndrome

Hereditary Multiple...

Medicines

Erlichia

There are several species of Ehrlichia, but the one that most commonly affects dogs and causes the most severe clinical signs is Ehrlichia canis. The brown dog tick, or Rhipicephalus sanguineous, that passes the Ehrlichia to the dog is prevalent throughout most of the United States, but most cases tend to occur in the Southwest and Gulf Coast regions where there is a high concentration of the tick.

Disease Overview

Dogs get ehrlichiosis from the brown dog tick, which passes an ehrlichia organism into the bloodstream when it bites. There are three stages of ehrlichiosis, each varying in severity. The acute stage, occurring several weeks after infection and lasting for up to a month, can lead to fever and lowered peripheral blood cell counts. The second stage, called the subclinical phase, has no outward signs and can last for the remainder of the dog's life, during which the dog remains infected with the organism. In some dog breeds, such as the German Shepherd dog, the third and most serious stage of infection, the chronic phase, will commence. Very low blood cell counts (pancytopenia), bleeding, bacterial infection, lameness, neurological and ophthalmic disorders, and kidney disease, can result. Chronic ehrlichiosis can be fatal.

Treatments

Antibiotics, administered for an extended period of time, are effective at eliminating the infection. Dogs with severe cases of chronic ehrlichiosis cannot be cured, but supportive care and treatment of diseases secondary to the infection, such as anemia, can help stabilize the dog.

Signs and symptoms

The acute stage of the disease, occurring most often in the spring and summer, begins one to three weeks after infection and lasts for two to four weeks. Clinical signs include a fever, petechiae, bleeding disorders, and vasculitis. There are no outward signs of the subclinical phase. Clinical signs of the chronic phase include pale gums due to anemia, bleeding due to thrombocytopenia, vasculitis, lymphadenopathy, respiratory dyspnea, coughing, polyuria, polydipsia, lameness, ophthalmic diseases such as retinal hemorrhage and anterior uveitis, and neurological disease. Dogs that are severely affected can die from this disease.

Although people can get ehrlichiosis, dogs do not transmit the bacteria to humans; rather, ticks pass on the ehrlichia organism. Clinical signs of human ehrlichiosis include fever, headache, eye pain, and gastrointestinal upset.

Diagnosis

Diagnosis is achieved most commonly by serologic testing of the blood for the presence of antibodies against the ehrlichia organism. Many veterinarians routinely test for the disease, especially in enzootic areas. It should be noted, however, that during the acute phase of infection, the test can be falsely negative because the body will not have had time to make antibodies to the infection. As such, the test should be repeated. In addition, blood tests may show abnormalities in the numbers of red cells, white cells, and platelets, if the disease is present. Uncommonly, a diagnosis can be made by looking under a microscope at a blood smear for the presence of the ehrlichia organism, which sometimes can be seen within a white blood cell.

Read more at Wikipedia.org

• [List your site here Free!]

Serologic evidence of human granulocytic ehrlichiosis, Greece - Letters - Brief Article
From Emerging Infectious Diseases, 6/1/02 by Stella Alexiou Daniel

To the Editor: Human granulocytic ehrlichiosis (HGE), a tickborne infectious disease, was first described in 1994 (1). Several cases have been reported in the United States; reports of acute cases in Europe have been rare, although European serosurveys of the prevalence of antibodies to the HGE agent have been conducted (24). No similar serosurvey has been conducted in Greece, although Ixodes ricinus, thought to be the principal tick vector in Europe (5), is present in northern Greece (6). Lyme disease, which is transmitted by the same tick, has never been reported, and the seroprevalence of Lyme borreliosis in

Greece is very low (7). We examined sera of 300 persons (100 men and 200 women) ages 15-78 years (mean age [+ or -] standard deviation 52.7 [+ or -] 18.0 years), which were collected at six county hospitals in northern Greece and sent to our laboratory from April to October 2000. The participants were mostly farmers, all of whom lived in rural areas of northern Greece. All participants were healthy and had been hospitalized for routine blood tests. Each patient completed a questionnaire about medical history. The selected patients had no known history of rickettsiosis and reported no febrile or influenza-like illness during the past 6 months. Each participant provided oral consent for the serum to be used for detecting antibodies against several infectious agents related to zoonoses. The following information was recorded for each participant: age, sex, occupation, and area of residence.

Serum samples were tested by indirect immunofluorescence (IFA) with commercially available antigen (Focus Technologies, Cypress, California), which uses HGE-1-infected HL60 cells. Titers [is greater than or equal to] 64 were considered positive. All sera were also tested for Rickettsia conorii, R. typhi, Coxiella burneti, and Ehrlichia chaffeensis by IFA and for Borrelia burgdorferi by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay and Western blot. Sera that reacted positively to more than one of these agents were excluded. Biostatistical analysis was performed by using the statistical package SPSS for Windows 10.0.1 (Standard version, SPSS Inc., Chicago, IL).

The overall prevalence of antibodies to the HGE agent was 7.3% (8.0% for men and 7.0% for women). No statistically significant differences were observed in the prevalence of antibodies in the six prefecture hospitals. Participants had no statistically significant differences in sex or age. Antibody titers to HGE were low (of 22 positive sera, 12 had titers [is greater than or equal to] 64 and 10 had titers [is greater than or equal to] 128).

Several serosurveys of the prevalence of antibodies to the HGE agent have been conducted across Europe in both healthy persons and patients with suspected or confirmed Lyme borreliosis (2,3,8). Since cases of B. burgdorferi infection are rare or nonexistent in Greece and the seroprevalence of Lyme borreliosis is very low, we selected as participants 300 healthy farmers who lived in rural areas. These persons compose a group at high risk for exposure to tick bites and therefore to I. ricinus. Our prevalence is higher than those observed in Bulgaria (2.9%) and Germany (1.9%) (2,3). This finding could be attributed to the fact that the prevalence in these countries was based on blood donors, unlike our survey. However, our prevalence is substantially lower than that in Slovenia, where 15.4% of the examined population had detectable antibodies to the HGE agent and several cases of HE have been confirmed (4). Our observation that no significant differences occurred in the prevalence of antibodies to the HGE agent in the six prefectures studied could be explained by the fact that these districts are small, with little variation in environmental and climatic condi tions. Even though the antibody titers to the HGE agent were low in our survey, they suggest infection at an undetermined time (9). Seven of our sera were antibody positive to both the HGE agent and at least one other rickettsial agent or B. burgdorferi. This fact, which has been observed elsewhere (9), may result from coinfection or crossreaction. These sera were excluded. Our data suggest the possibility that HGE cases exist in Greece. Since such cases have been not been reported to date, they are likely under-diagnosed. Further research is needed to clarify the presence of the HGE agent in Greece.

Stella Alexiou Daniel, Katerina Manika, Malamatenia Arvanitidou, Eudoxia Diza, Nikolaos Symeonidis, and Antonis Antoniadis

Aristotelian University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece

References

(1.) Chen SM, Dumler JS, Bakken JS, Walker DH. Identification of a granulocytotropic Ehrlichia species as the etiologic agent of human disease. J Clin Microbiol 1994;32:589-95.

(2.) Christova IS, Dumler JS. Human granulocytic ehrlichiosis in Bulgaria. Am J Trop Med Hyg 1999;60:58-61.

(3.) Fingerle V, Goodman JL, Johnson RC, Kurtti T J, Munderloh UG, Wilske B. Epidemiological aspects of human granulocytic ehrlichiosis in southern Germany. Wien Kiln Wochenschr 1999; 111:1000-4.

(4.) Cizman M, Avsic-Zupanc T, Petrovec M, Ruzic-Sabljic E, Pokorn M. Seroprevalence of ehrlichiosis, Lyme borreliosis and tickborne encephalitis infections in children and young adults in Slovenia. Wien Klin Wochenschr 2000; 112:842-5.

(5.) Petrovec M, Sumner JW, Nicholson WL, Childs JE, Strle F, Barlic J, et al. Identity of ehrlichial DNA sequences derived from Ixodes ricinus ticks with those obtained from patients with human granulocytic ehrlichiosis in Slovenia. J Clin Microbiol 1999;37:209-10.

(6.) Papadopoulos B, Morel PC, Aeschlimann A. Ticks of domestic animals in the Macedonia region of Greece. Vet Parasitol 1996;63:25-40.

(7.) Stamouli M, Totos G, Braun HB, Michel G, Gizaris V. Very low seroprevalence of Lyme borreliosis in young Greek males. Eur J Epidemiol 2000;16: 495-6.

(8.) Skarphedinsson S, Sogaard P, Pedersen C. Seroprevalence of human granulocytic ehrlichiosis in high-risk groups in Denmark. Stand J Infect Dis 2001;33:206-10.

(9.) Comer JA, Nicholson WL, Olson JG, Childs JE. Serological testing for human granulocytic ehrlichiosis at a national referral center. J Clin Microbiol 1999;37:55864.

Return to Ehrlichiosis

Home

Contact

Resources

Exchange Links

ebay