Bloodsucking arthropods: the danger for travellers and hazard of vector travelling

Abstract

The newly obtained data supplemented our knowledge about risk for travellers, tourists and natives of Europe connected with malaria, leishmaniasis and other tropical diseases. It was discovered that healthy carriers of Epstein-Barr virus (nearly 90% of human population) have a great risk to get chronic Burkitt lymphoma disease as a result of Plasmodium falciparum (tropical malaria agent) infection. HIV carriers being occasionally in contact with visceral leishmaniasis vectors (sand-flies infected on dogs in the Mediterranean area) not only got a heavy form of disease but became a source of infection for healthy people. Airport malaria and outbreaks of dengue fever sometimes were (and are) connected with an import of infective Anopheles or Aedes mosquitoes. The high risk of borreliosis and ehrlichiosis infection exists in the forested European areas along the highways, where picnics and other types of recreation of travellers and tourists are typical and where the anthropogenically changed Ixodes ticks subpopulations are distributed. Such physiologically changed part of tick population is more aggressive and "changed ticks" more often are vectors of one, two or even more agent species simultaneously.