The Tick

TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES: THE ULTIMATE COLLECTION, VOL. 1. AUGUST 2011. © 2011 Viacom International Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Tick tock! Do things with lots of legs creep you out? This may not be the book for you... Matt Malloy, infectious diseases expert, for the DOH vector-borne disease division knew there was something wrong with the Buffalo Head infection cluster as soon as it hit his desk. But knowing it instinctively and proving it were two completely different things, especially when his boss and coworkers already thought that, battling sleep deprivation, he’d already gone around the bend. Matt knew that solving the mysteries of the Buffalo Head cluster was a matter of life and death. He just didn’t know that it could be a matter of his life and death. It could happen to you. Maybe it already has. Feast on this new mystery today.

What would be your ideal job if money didn't matter? How far would you go for a promotion? When did you last stand up for what you believe in? What are you afraid of? In this unique handbook to life and work, there are no right or wrong answers: only honest ones. Because before you can build a career or find happiness, you must first know yourself. From the professional to the personal, the everyday to the existential, the wide-ranging questions in this book will help to illuminate your life, your motivations, your ambitions and your values, and will help you find your own fulfilling path. You can use the book alone, like a journal, or with a colleague, partner or friend. Either way, through these pertinent and enjoyable questions you will find answers to everything that really matters.

Ticks are noticeable by the high diversity of pathogens they can transmit, most of them with implications in human and animal health. Ticks are arachnids, meaning that they do not share the biological and ecological features of the mosquitoes and other parasitic Diptera. The natural foci of tick-borne pathogens may be as large as a continent, or be restricted to small portions of a country, without apparently too many similar features. The life cycle of the ticks involved three developing instars. The precise relationships of ticks and their hosts, the specific seasonal pattern of activity of ticks, and the still poorly known molecular relationships between ticks and the pathogens they can transmit, make these vectors a specially fecund field of research. Importantly, extensive studies on the biological and ecological relationships of ticks and abiotic (climate and vegetation) conditions have revealed the fine-tuning of the ticks and the pathogens they transmit, together with the biological effects of host and the driving features by the climate. The studies on tick-transmitted pathogens have been on the rise in the last years. There is a growing interest in understand the somewhat complex relationships between the landscape, the climate, the vectors and the pathogens, because the concerns of spread, probably driven by subtle changes in climate and man made alterations of the landscape. Studies on Lyme borreliosis are addressing the interesting issue of the relationships between the climate, the tick activity patterns, and the selection of strains according to the reservoir availability. Furthermore, the expanding field of habitat suitability modeling has been applied with different degrees of success to evaluate and quantify the risk of disease transmission. In such exponentially growing field, revisionary books are clearly welcome additions to the bibliographical tools of researchers. It is however necessary the compilation of works devoted to explore the tip of the iceberg in the field of research. In this Research Topic, we wish to summarize and review the studies on ecology, molecular biology, and tick-host-pathogens interactions, provided to resolve the important issues of ticks and pathogens. We want not only the results obtained by newly developed molecular tools, but rigorous reviews of the most recent advances in these issues. This Topic will cover aspects of both human and animal health, with special interest on zoonoses. Aspects of the biology of the ticks, as affecting the transmission of pathogens, are of special interest in this Topic. Studies on ticks of the poorly known family Argasidae, as related to their involvement on pathogen transmission, are especially welcome. We also wish to describe the perspective of the field in the future. Finally, the presentation of ongoing original works is greatly encouraged.