Ehrlichiosis

The rapid diagnostic test provides a comprehensive solution for detecting canine leishmaniosis that impacts one in 10 dogs in endemic regions WESTBROOK, Maine, Nov. 8, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- IDEXX Laboratories, Inc. (NASDAQ: IDXX), a global leader in pet healthcare innovation, announced the upcoming launch of the SNAP® Leish 4Dx® Test, a comprehensive screening test for vector-borne diseases, including canine leishmaniosis. The SNAP Leish 4Dx Test uses the trusted SNAP 4Dx Plus testing platform, which detects Lyme disease, heartworm disease, ehrlichiosis, and anaplasmosis. By replacing Lyme disease detection with detection of leishmaniosis, a more prevalent endemic disease in certain regions of the world, the SNAP Leish 4Dx Test supports vector-borne disease diagnosis globally. The test will be available in Europe and Asia beginning February 2024. Continue Reading IDEXX Laboratories Leishmaniosis is a potentially fatal zoonotic disease transmitted to dogs by sand flies commonly found in tropical and subtropical regions of Europe, Asia, Africa, and South and Central America. Early detection is key; any dog living in or traveling to these endemic regions is susceptible to infection and should be tested, as the disease can be fatal if left untreated. Infected dogs can remain asymptomatic for months to years, making testing for leishmaniosis an essential component of annual wellness screens. "In Leishmania-endemic areas globally, where one in 10 dogs tested may be positive, it's critical for practitioners to screen healthy dogs annually for Leishmania antibodies, along with other common vector-borne pathogens, using a qualitative, comprehensive test with sufficient sensitivity and specificity at the point-of-care," said Professor Guadalupe Miró, DEVPC, Veterinary Faculty, Universidad Complutense of Madrid, Spain. "For Leishmania-seropositive dogs, it's also extremely important to quantify infection level and consider results from chemistry, CBC differentials, and urinalysis, so veterinarians can best determine a treatment or monitoring plan." The launch of the SNAP Leish 4Dx Test provides veterinarians with an end-to-end solution for vector-borne disease testing, including: The ability to screen for heartworm disease, ehrlichiosis, anaplasmosis, and leishmaniosis with a single sample during the patient visit. Streamlined reference laboratory follow-up testing for quantification of SNAP positives and the opportunity to perform additional follow-up testing in-clinic or at IDEXX Reference Laboratories. Compatibility with the SNAP Pro® Analyzer, which supports an efficient practice workflow by automatically activating and interpreting test results and facilitating seamless charge capture. Ongoing support and education to keep veterinary staff up-to-date with the latest resources to help protect pets and their families. "Parasites and vector-borne diseases like leishmaniosis are an increasing risk to the health of pets globally," said Jay Mazelsky, IDEXX President and Chief Executive Officer. "This expansion of our SNAP franchise demonstrates our commitment to expanding our vector-borne disease offering to support veterinarians worldwide in their mission to deliver a higher standard of care for pets." For more information about the SNAP platform, please visit idexx.com/en/veterinary/products/snap-tests/ About IDEXX IDEXX is a global leader in pet healthcare innovation. Our diagnostic and software products and services create clarity in the complex, constantly evolving world of veterinary medicine. We support longer, fuller lives for pets by delivering insights and solutions that help the veterinary community around the world make confident decisions—to advance medical care, improve efficiency, and build thriving practices. Our innovations also help ensure the safety of milk and water across the world and maintain the health and well-being of people and livestock. IDEXX Laboratories, Inc. is a member of the S&P 500® Index. Headquartered in Maine, IDEXX employs nearly 11,000 people and offers solutions and products to customers in more than 175 countries and territories. For more information about IDEXX, visit idexx.com. Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements This news release contains or may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements can be identified by the use of words such as "expects," "may," "anticipates," "intends," "would," "will," "plans," "believes," "estimates," "should," "project," and similar words and expressions. These forward-looking statements are intended to provide our current expectations or forecasts of future events; are based on current estimates, projections, beliefs, and assumptions; and are not guarantees of future performance. Actual events or results may differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements. These statements are subject to risks, uncertainties, assumptions, and other important factors. Readers are cautioned not to put undue reliance on such forward-looking statements because actual results may vary materially from those expressed or implied. The reports filed by IDEXX pursuant to United States securities laws contain discussions of some of these risks and uncertainties. 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When it comes to preventing tick bites -- especially in light of the dramatic, decade-long rise in tick-borne diseases -- bug sprays help but are less than optimal. When it comes to preventing tick bites -- especially in light of the dramatic, decade-long rise in tick-borne diseases -- bug sprays help but are less than optimal. For example, DEET was designed to keep quick-moving mosquitoes from landing on their host, where they bite and fly off in seconds. Ticks, on the other hand, don't fly but rather ambush and then climb slowly up their host until they embed, feed and may remain for days. "Unfortunately most repellants were developed for mosquitoes 75-plus years ago and not for ticks," says vector-borne disease expert Stephen Rich, professor of microbiology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and executive director of the UMass Amherst-based New England Center of Excellence in Vector-Borne Diseases (NEWVEC). "DEET, the gold standard, works fairly well, but a holy grail would be to have another repellency tool -- not a contact repellent like DEET but a spatial repellent -- that works as good as or better than DEET against ticks." Experiments at Rich's Laboratory of Medical Zoology used a new controlled-release device developed by scientist-entrepreneur Noel Elman with funding from the Department of Defense's medical research programs. Rich and colleagues tested the effects on ticks after releasing the synthetic pyrethroids transfluthrin and metofluthrin into a small, transparent chamber equipped with three vertical climbing sticks. Ticks don't come in direct contact with the repellents but rather the active ingredients create more of a "force field" that alters and slows the ticks' progress toward their target. The results, published today, Nov. 8, in the journal PLOS ONE, found that the two spatial repellents were effective at changing the behavior of ticks, making them less likely to climb vertically and more likely to detach or fall off the stick. "While we still have much work to do, these innovative findings prove the principle that these spatial repellents alter the behavior in ticks in a way we hope will lead to fewer tick bites," says Rich, senior author. The paper's lead author, Eric Siegel, helped design the vision system that precisely tracked tick movement in the experiment chamber. "People throw the word 'repellency' around a lot, and we made it a goal to redefine repellency in tick protection and find ways to measure it," says Siegel, a lab technician about to begin his Ph.D. studies in microbiology under Rich. "There's so much we still don't know about tick olfactory [smell] and gustatory [taste] mechanisms, and this was the biggest challenge in these experiments, as is the case overall in the development of protective products." The compounds were tested against the three main human-biting ticks in the U.S.: I. scapularis (black-legged or deer tick), which can spread Lyme disease and anaplasmosis, among other diseases; D. variabilis (American dog tick), which can transmit Rocky Mountain spotted fever and tularemia; and A. americanum (lone star tick), which can spread ehrlichiosis and has been associated with an allergy to red meat. The experiments found that transfluthrin deterred 75% of D. variabilis, 67% of A. Americanum and 50% of I. scapularis. Metofluthrin was slightly more effective, deterring 81% of D. variabilis, 73% of A. americanum and 72% of I. scapularis. "We were impressed with not just the repellency but the behavioral changes in the tick," says co-author Elman, founder and CEO of GearJump Technologies, who received the DoD funding to design a controlled-release device that can attach to the boot of soldiers. Many of the ticks in the experiments became slower moving, less mobile and appeared to be in a "drunken-like state," according to the paper. Elman approached Rich a few years ago to design and run experiments using the device with various repellents. A next step is to conduct experiments with actual animal hosts. "Repellents probably won't stop ticks from getting on us," Rich says. "We hope the repellents will help keep them from staying on us, and that's where the battle lines really should be drawn." The researchers can envision a day when such devices will be commercially available to the general population. Until then, the research will continue. "We still mostly don't know how the chemicals we use work," Siegel says. "When we do, we can develop and refine these measures in a more targeted way."

Prescribed fire -- a tool increasingly used by forest managers and landowners to combat invasive species, improve wildlife habitat and restore ecosystem health -- also could play a role in reducing the abundance of ticks and the transmission of disease pathogens they carry, according to a team of scientists. Prescribed fire -- a tool increasingly used by forest managers and landowners to combat invasive species, improve wildlife habitat and restore ecosystem health -- also could play a role in reducing the abundance of ticks and the transmission of disease pathogens they carry, according to a team of scientists. For a recently published paper, the researchers reviewed the scientific literature on the effects of fire on forest composition and structure and its influence on ticks and their wildlife hosts. They concluded that prescribed burning can help restore forest habitats to a state less favorable to several species of disease-carrying ticks and could be an effective management tactic for reducing their populations. The era of fire suppression, which began roughly in the early 1900s and has continued for more than a century, changed the species composition of Eastern forests, creating habitats and microclimates that favored the survival and spread of ticks, noted lead author Michael Gallagher, research ecologist at the Silas Little Experimental Forest, Northern Research Station, U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service, New Lisbon, New Jersey. "Before the arrival of Europeans, Eastern forests were 'fire-dependent,' characterized by fire-tolerant species such as pine, oak and chestnut," Gallagher said. "Frequent low-to-moderate intensity fires would have fostered dry conditions, thinned the understory and diminished layers of leaf litter, which in turn would have created microclimates with lower humidity and higher temperatures. "These lower-moisture, higher-temperature -- or xeric -- conditions were likely to limit ticks' activity, interaction with reservoir hosts and overall populations," he said. Since fire has been suppressed and forests have recovered significantly from periods of deforestation caused by logging and agricultural land-clearing, fire-sensitive mesic forest species -- those that thrive in and contribute to moister environments -- have become dominant, a process known as mesophication, he explained. "This mesophication of forests has been widely observed throughout the eastern United States," Gallagher said. "In the absence of fire, these mesic habitats moderate forest temperatures and humidity, promote denser understory growth, and cause greater moisture retention in forest litter. This creates microclimates within the ideal range for tick survival and optimizes conditions for ticks to 'quest,' or seek hosts." The number of tick-borne disease cases in the United States has trended higher in recent decades, ranging to as high as nearly 60,000 annually and accounting for more than 75% of vector-borne disease cases, according to the researchers, who published their analysis in Ecological Applications. Tick-borne pathogens can cause Lyme disease, anaplasmosis, ehrlichiosis, Powassan disease, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, tularemia and other illnesses. "Research suggests that conditions contributing to this rise in cases resulted from climate change, growth of certain wildlife populations, land-use change and, likely, forest change due to the decline of fire frequency," said co-author Erika Machtinger, assistant professor of entomology in Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences. "These changes have created conditions known to drive tick abundance, tick-wildlife host interactions and expansion of ticks' geographic range." In addition to fire's direct effect on tick survival by subjecting them to heat high enough to cause mortality, several indirect effects of fire-driven forest modification can suppress tick abundance and pathogen transmission, she said. "Reductions in canopy and understory density and the creation of gap space from prescribed burning can increase sun exposure and wind speed and reduce evapotranspiration from plants, promoting hotter and drier conditions during the daytime and colder temperatures at night," said Machtinger, who directs the college's Veterinary Entomology Laboratory. "These more frequent moisture and temperature extremes can exceed tick tolerances and affect behavior, development time, molting and overall survival." She also pointed out that thinner layers of leaf litter due to burning could reduce insulation and lower the temperature of soils where ticks overwinter, causing higher mortality. In addition, studies indicate that fire-driven habitat change is likely to increase the population of certain wildlife predators of ticks, such as red imported fire ants and bobwhite quail. "On the other hand, reduced woody plant density and debris as a result of fire actually may decrease populations of some small mammal hosts of ticks by removing cover and making them more vulnerable to predation," Machtinger said. "This would reduce ticks' interaction with hosts that serve as reservoirs of disease pathogens." The researchers noted that the current paradigm for tick-borne disease control places nearly all the burden on the individual to prevent tick bites, while broader-scale tick management by professionals has been insufficient to stem increases in tick-borne pathogen transmission. "Although the fire suppression era persists in many parts of the United States, prescribed burns have been used successfully in a growing number of fire-suppressed landscapes in recent decades," Gallagher said. "We believe there's an opportunity to reduce the number of ticks by using prescribed fire to restore the health of forest ecosystems, and we think this approach can be integrated as part of a multipronged strategy for managing ticks and tick-borne diseases." Other co-authors of the paper are Jesse Kreye, assistant professor of fire and natural resources management, and Nathaniel Schmidt, former master's degree student, Penn State; Alexis Everland, New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, Forest Fire Service, New Lisbon, New Jersey; and Nicholas Skowronski, USDA Forest Service, Northern Research Station, Morgantown, West Virginia. Penn State Extension and USDA's National Institute of Food and Agriculture supported this work.