Hedgehogs held a special place in ancient Egyptian life like many other desert- and marsh-dwelling animals. Their natural defensive qualities were admired by ancient Egyptians and their bodily parts, notably their hardened spines, were used as ingred...
Most of the pathologies that affect hedgehogs are diagnosed postmortem; thus, it is essential to share knowledge between clinicians and pathologists in order to recognize predispositions to diseases and to establish adequate diagnostic and therapeuti...
Pet hedgehogs, which are increasingly favoured companions, have garnered attention due to their potential as carriers of zoonotic diseases. These small insectivorous mammals, native to Europe, Asia, and Africa, are commonly kept as pets. The encroach...
Numerous previous studies indicate that both wild hedgehogs and those kept as pets pose a significant risk to human health. At the same time, humans can also transmit various pathogens to hedgehogs (e.g., human herpesvirus 1). The risk of human infec...
Hedgehogs are small insectivorous mammals common across Europe, Asia, and Africa. The increased encroachment of humans into hedgehog habitats has disrupted the human-animal-environment interface. With growing interest in the zoonotic diseases of wild...
While dromedaries are the immediate animal source of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) epidemic, viruses related to MERS coronavirus (MERS-CoV) have also been found in bats as well as hedgehogs. To elucidate the evolution of MERS-CoV-related vi...
This article asks whether UK universities care about hedgehogs more than they care about people of colour. This absurd question is based on an analysis which shows that UK universities have had much greater engagement with the Hedgehog Friendly Campu...
Monitoring data from several European countries indicate that European hedgehog (Erinaceus europaeus) populations are declining, and research exploring the causes of the decline, including exposure to potentially harmful xenobiotics and metals, may i...
Transport infrastructure is a pervasive element in modern landscapes and continues to expand to meet the demands of a growing human population and its associated resource consumption. Road-induced mortality is often thought to be a major contributor...
The number of European hedgehogs (Erinaceus europaeus) is in long-term decline across Europe. Recently, an additional threat to hedgehogs’ lives has been cutting injuries caused by garden care equipment, but to date, there have been no reliable...
Enteric protozoan parasites, such as Blastocystis sp., Balantioides coli, Cryptosporidium spp., and Giardia duodenalis, may have implications for both animal and human health.Transmitted through the fecal–oral route, these parasites cause sympt...
Assuming the Multiple Point Principle (MPP) as a new law of Nature, we considered the existence of the two degenerate vacua of the Universe: (a) the first Electroweak (EW) vacuum at
European hedgehogs (Erinaceus europaeus), also known as common hedgehogs, can be found all throughout Western Europe, including the Iberian Peninsula and Italy on the south side and Scandinavia in the north. Hedgehogs are known to carry a variety of...
SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV, and SARS-CoV-2 have posed tremendous threats to human health, highlighting the necessity of monitoring cross-species transmission of animal coronaviruses to humans. Hedgehogs infected with coronaviruses have been reported in sever...
The genus Erinaceus is commonly found in rescue centres across the European continent despite the reported decline in some countries. Parasite infections are frequently detected in rescued hedgehogs, leading to increased morbidity and mortality and c...
West European hedgehogs (Erinaceus europaeus) are likely to encounter unusual ecological features in urban habitats, such as anthropogenic food sources and artificial refugia. Quantifying how these affect hedgehog behaviour is vital for informing con...
African pygmy hedgehogs (Atelerix albiventris) are popular exotic pets in Japan, and their breeding numbers have recently increased. Although various diseases have been reported in hedgehogs, including skin, respiratory, neurological, and neoplastic...
Hedgehogs occur within an urban mammal guild in the United Kingdom. This guild commonly utilizes anthropogenic food provision, which is potentially beneficial to wild animal populations, but may also bring competitors and predators into proximity, ra...
African pygmy hedgehogs (APHs) are increasingly kept as companion animals, yet evidence-based nutritional recommendations for this species remain limited. Commercial cat or kitten diets are still commonly used by owners and veterinarians in practice,...
The Western European Hedgehog (Erinaceous europaeus) is a nocturnal animal that is in decline in much of Europe, but the monitoring of this species is subjective, prone to error, and an inadequate basis for estimating population trends. Here, we repo...
Previous research has established that some models of robotic lawn mowers are potentially harmful to hedgehogs. As the market for robotic lawn mowers is expanding rapidly and the populations of European hedgehogs (Erinaceus europaeus) are in decline,...
Free-living animals frequently play a key role in the circulation of various zoonotic vector-borne pathogens. Bacteria of the genus Bartonella are transmitted by blood-feeding arthropods and infect a large range of mammals. Although only several spec...
Urban fauna is defined as animal species that can live in urban environments. Several species, including the western-European hedgehog (Erinaceus europaeus), have now been identified as part of this urban fauna, becoming permanent residents of parks...
The most common causes of respiratory diseases in wild hedgehogs are the lungworms Crenosoma striatum and Capillaria aerophila, which can lead to life-threatening pneumonia. The aim of the current study was (A) to assess the prevalence of common lung...
European hedgehogs are an important reservoir for many pathogens of health interest. Since hedgehogs live in close contact with humans, potential zoonotic fungi raise significant public health concerns, especially in areas with a high hedgehog densit...
Among synanthropic species, European hedgehogs are widely distributed throughout Europe. In recent decades, these animals have increasingly adapted to anthropogenic environments, where they find abundant shelter and food resources, along with fewer n...
The West European hedgehog (Erinaceus europaeus) is in decline, and it is important to identify its challenges. We used VHF-telemetry to monitor pre-hibernation space use, nest use, and hibernation sites in a suburban area in Norway. Based on nine ad...
With urban areas growing worldwide comes an increase in artificial light at night (ALAN), causing a significant impact on wildlife behaviour and its ecological relationships. The effects of ALAN on nocturnal and protected European hedgehogs (Erinaceu...
Hyperglycemia is known to negatively affect various animal species, but data on African pygmy hedgehogs remain limited. This study aimed to investigate the prevalence of hyperglycemia and evaluate the clinical characteristics and prognostic factors o...
Toxoplasma gondii is a generalist zoonotic parasite that involves a wide range of warm-blooded animals as intermediate hosts and felines as definitive hosts. Recent studies have proved significant positive associations between human population densit...
Hedgehogs are small omnivorous mammals prevalent across Europe, Asia, and Africa. The expanding intrusion of humans into hedgehog habitats and rising popularity of keeping exotic animals like hedgehogs as pets have disrupted the delicate balance of t...
Thanks to its ethological and physiological characteristics, the hedgehog is a synanthropic species of particular importance for the maintenance and possible spread of pathogens, some of which are zoonotic. Among these, we can include the mammalian o...
The rising number of European hedgehogs (Erinaceus europaeus) admitted every year to wildlife rehabilitation centres might be a source of concern to animal and public health since transmissible diseases, such as dermatophytosis, can be easily dissemi...
The western European hedgehog (Erinaceus europaeus) and the northern white-breasted hedgehog (E. roumanicus) are natural hosts of the tick Ixodes hexagonus, the vector of tick-borne pathogens such as the Borreliella bacteria responsible for Lyme dise...
The European hedgehog is in decline, triggering a need to monitor population dynamics to optimise conservation initiatives directed at this species. By counting periosteal growth lines, we determined the age of 388 dead European hedgehogs collected t...
European hedgehogs (Erinaceus europaeus) are nocturnal insectivores frequently found in urban areas. In the last decades, their population has declined in various European countries and human activities have emerged as significant contributors to thi...
Background: Wildlife is increasingly recognized as an important component in the epidemiology of zoonotic pathogens. Salmonella spp., a leading cause of foodborne disease worldwide, can circulate across human, domestic animal, and environmental inter...
Lyme borreliosis (LB), caused by spirochetes of the Borrelia burgdorferi sensu lato (s.l.) complex, is one of the most common vector-borne zoonotic diseases in Europe. Knowledge about the enzootic circulation of Borrelia pathogens between ticks and t...
Wildlife rehabilitation centers (WRC) play a crucial role in the collection of data and the monitoring of hedgehog populations. The main objective of this study was to identify the morbidity and prognostic factors associated with the mortality of wil...
Wildlife has been suggested to be a good sentinel of environmental health because of its close interaction with human populations, domestic animals, and natural ecosystems. The alarming emergence of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in human and veterin...
Coronaviruses are closely monitored in the context of emerging diseases and, as illustrated with Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome-coronavirus (MERS-CoV), are known to cross the species barr...
The Western European Hedgehog (Erinaceus europaeus) is one of the four hedgehog species belonging to the genus Erinaceus. Among them, E. amurensis is extant in East Asia’s areas only, whereas E. europaeus, E. roumanicus and E. concolor are main...
Due to their need for living cells, viruses have developed adaptive evolutionary strategies to survive and perpetuate in reservoir hosts that play a crucial role in the ecology of emerging pathogens. Pathogenic and potentially pandemic betacoronaviru...
This study aimed to analyze the admission causes, outcomes, primary causes of death, and main lesions observed in the post mortem examinations of Western European hedgehogs, Erinaceus europaeus (Linnaeus, 1758), in the north of Portugal. The data wer...
Tickborne intracellular bacterial pathogens including Anaplasma, Coxiella burnetti, Ehrlichia, and Rickettsia cause emerging infectious diseases worldwide. PCR was used to amplify the genes of these pathogens in Haemaphysalis flava ticks collected fr...
Since its initial discovery in a Drosophila mutagenesis screen, the Hedgehog pathway has been revealed to be instrumental in the proper development of the vertebrate face. Vertebrates possess three hedgehog paralogs: Sonic hedgehog (Shh), Indian hedg...
Malignant pleural mesothelioma (MPM) is a cancer associated with exposure to asbestos fibers, which accumulate in the pleural space, damage tissue and stimulate regeneration. Hedgehog signaling is a pathway important during embryonic mesothelium deve...
The peripheral nervous system has important regenerative capacities that regulate and restore peripheral nerve homeostasis. Following peripheral nerve injury, the nerve undergoes a highly regulated degeneration and regeneration process called Walleri...
In 2022, a novel parvovirus was identified from an outbreak of fatal enteritis in weaned European hedgehogs (Erinaceus europaeus) at a wildlife rescue center in Southern Italy. During sequence analysis, the strain was found to be closely related (90....
Discussions of therapeutic suppression of hedgehog (Hh) signaling almost exclusively focus on receptor antagonism; however, hedgehog’s biosynthesis represents a unique and potentially targetable aspect of this oncogenic signaling pathway. Here, we re...
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