Search Results (15,363)

Livestock-associated Staphylococcus species—particularly Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus), Staphylococcus pseudintermedius (S. pseudintermedius), and coagulase-negative staphylococci (CoNS)—pose escalating threats to animal health, food safety, and public health due to their evolving antimicrobial resistance (AMR) profiles. This review synthesizes recent insights into the molecular epidemiology, resistance determinants, and host adaptation strategies of these pathogens across food-producing animals. We highlight the role of mobile genetic elements (MGEs), clonal dissemination, and biofilm formation in shaping multidrug resistance (MDR) patterns. Diagnostic advancements, including MALDI-TOF MS, whole-genome sequencing (WGS), and PCR-based assays, are discussed alongside treatment challenges arising from therapeutic failures and limited vaccine efficacy. The review critically examines current AMR surveillance gaps and the need for integrative One Health frameworks that encompass animals, humans, and the environment. Novel tools such as metagenomics, real-time genomic surveillance, and artificial intelligence (AI)-driven analytics are proposed to enhance predictive monitoring and resistance management. Together, these insights underscore the urgency of coordinated, evidence-based interventions to curb the spread of MDR staphylococci and safeguard One Health. Full article

Background: Pulmonary benign metastasizing leiomyoma (PBML) is a rare condition characterized by histologically benign smooth muscle tumors occurring at extrauterine sites, often in women with a history of uterine leiomyoma. While PBML generally exhibits indolent behavior, its pathogenesis, management, and malignant potential remain unclear. Methods: This study retrospectively analyzes the clinical characteristics, imaging features, diagnostic approaches, pathological findings, treatment strategies, and outcomes of seven patients with PBML treated at our institution between January 2016 and May 2025. Results: Seven patients were included, with a mean age at diagnosis of 48.9 ± 5.6 years. Two patients presented with respiratory symptoms. Imaging revealed multiple bilateral pulmonary nodules in four patients and solitary nodules in three. Six patients were diagnosed via video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery, and one through computed tomography-guided percutaneous biopsy. Immunohistochemistry revealed positivity for SMA and Desmin in all cases, ER in six, and PR in five, with the Ki-67 labeling index ≤3% in six patients. One patient had a coexisting in situ mucinous adenocarcinoma within the PBML lesion. All had a history of uterine leiomyoma. After diagnosis, one patient received hormonal therapy, and another underwent right adnexectomy. The remaining patients were managed with surveillance without additional treatment. During follow-up, one patient developed distant organ metastasis. Conclusions: PBML is a rare, typically indolent condition with potential for metastasis. Accurate diagnosis relies on imaging, histopathology, and immunohistochemistry. This study reports a unique case of PBML coexisting with intratumoral in situ mucinous adenocarcinoma, a previously unreported finding that may broaden the known histopathological spectrum. Full article

Currently antibiotic resistance is one of the biggest threats to human and animal health. Its spread has been increasing around the world since the mid-20th century; thus, prevention and understanding of the causes are needed. The issue of antibiotic resistance is often attributed to the healthcare sector, yet numerous other sectors, such as the environment and the agri-food sector, also contribute to the spread of resistant bacteria. The presence of pharmaceutical residues and bacterial contaminants in sewage, landfills, food raw materials, and food industries promotes the selection and proliferation of resistant bacteria, including pathogenic strains that pose a threat to human and animal health. Water quality must be kept under control because microorganisms resistant to antibiotics can find suitable conditions to live, multiply, and be transported. This review focuses on recent findings on the role of water as a transmission route for antibiotic resistance across the livestock, agri-food, and aquaculture sectors. We mapped the full pathway of resistant bacteria, from environmental and raw food sources to the end consumer, and outlined future strategies for monitoring and control of antibiotic resistance. Full article

In complex traffic environments, image degradation due to adverse factors such as haze, low illumination, and occlusion significantly compromises the performance of object detection systems in recognizing vehicles and pedestrians. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a robust visual detection framework that integrates multi-stage image enhancement with a lightweight detection architecture. Specifically, an image preprocessing module incorporating ConvIR and CIDNet is designed to perform defogging and illumination enhancement, thereby substantially improving the perceptual quality of degraded inputs. Furthermore, a novel enhancement strategy based on the Horizontal/Vertical-Intensity color space is introduced to decouple brightness and chromaticity modeling, effectively enhancing structural details and visual consistency in low-light regions. In the detection phase, a lightweight state-space modeling network, Mamba-Driven Lightweight Detection Network with RT-DETR Decoding, is proposed for object detection in complex traffic scenes. This architecture integrates VSSBlock and XSSBlock modules to enhance detection performance, particularly for multi-scale and occluded targets. Additionally, a VisionClueMerge module is incorporated to strengthen the perception of edge structures by effectively fusing multi-scale spatial features. Experimental evaluations on traffic surveillance datasets demonstrate that the proposed method surpasses the mainstream YOLOv12s model in terms of mAP@50–90, achieving a performance gain of approximately 1.0 percentage point (from 0.759 to 0.769). While ensuring competitive detection accuracy, the model exhibits reduced parameter complexity and computational overhead, thereby demonstrating superior deployment adaptability and robustness. This framework offers a practical and effective solution for object detection in intelligent transportation systems operating under visually challenging conditions. Full article

SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV are two coronaviruses that have received significant attention due to their high pathogenicity and mortality rates in human populations. In this study, we compared their evolutionary dynamics to provide a One Health perspective on their differences in terms of the results of disease control. The phylogenetic network of SARS-CoVs showed that human isolates gathered into a “super-spreader” cluster and were distinct from civet isolates. In contrast, dromedary camel- and human-isolated MERS-CoVs were clustered together. Thus, most clades of MERS-CoV can infect humans, and MERS-CoVs seem to more easily spill over the animal-to-human interface. Additionally, the civet can be easily controlled, while the intermediate host (dromedary camels) of MERS-CoV is an important livestock species, so it is impossible to eliminate all animals. This further leads to difficulties in disease control in MERS. Although MERS-CoVs are endemic to dromedary camels in both the Middle East and Africa, human infections are mainly linked to the Middle East. The nucleotide sequences of the MERS-CoV receptor gen (dipeptidyl peptidase 4 (DPP4)) from 30 Egyptians, 36 Sudanese, and 34 Saudi Arabians showed little difference. These findings suggest that the observed disparities in MERS prevalence between populations in the Middle East and Africa may be more strongly attributed to inadequate disease surveillance and the limited camel-to-human transmission of clade C MERS-CoV in Africa, rather than variations in DPP4 gene. Full article

Migratory birds play a key role in the ecology of tick-borne pathogens, serving as both hosts for ticks and as potential carriers of a wide range of infectious agents that can affect wildlife, domestic animals, and humans. Their long-distance movements contribute to the dispersal of ticks and the pathogens they harbor, with potential implications for the emergence and spread of zoonotic disease. This study focuses on the prevalence of Rickettsia spp. and Babesia/Theileria spp. in ticks collected from migratory birds in Sardinia, Italy, during two consecutive migration seasons (April–May and October–November 2021), corresponding to the spring and autumn migratory periods. A total of 961 ticks, primarily Ixodes ricinus, was collected from various bird species. Molecular analyses using polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and sequencing enabled the detection and identification of multiple Rickettsia species, with R. helvetica, R. monacensis, and R. aeschlimannii being the most frequently identified. Protozoan pathogens, including B. venatorum and Theileria ovis, were also detected in the tick samples. These findings underscore the diversity of pathogens in bird-associated ticks and the role of migratory birds in the geographical spread of these diseases. These results also provide valuable insights into pathogen transmission dynamics and stress the importance of monitoring migratory birds to assess and mitigate the risks of zoonotic diseases. Further research is needed to clarify the ecological interactions among birds, ticks, and pathogens across different geographic regions. Full article

Infrared-visible image fusion quality is critical for nighttime perception in autonomous driving and surveillance but suffers severe degradation under extreme low-light conditions, including irreversible texture loss in visible images, thermal boundary diffusion artifacts, and overexposure under dynamic non-uniform illumination. To address these challenges, a Decomposition–Disentanglement–Dynamic Compensation framework, D3Fusion, is proposed. Firstly, a Retinex-inspired Decomposition Illumination Net (DIN) decomposes inputs into enhanced images and degradative illumination maps for joint low-light recovery. Secondly, an illumination-guided encoder and a multi-scale differential compensation decoder dynamically balance cross-modal features. Finally, a progressive three-stage training paradigm from illumination correction through feature disentanglement to adaptive fusion resolves optimization conflicts. Compared to State-of-the-Art methods, on the LLVIP, TNO, MSRS, and RoadScene datasets, D3Fusion achieves an average improvement of 1.59% in standard deviation (SD), 6.9% in spatial frequency (SF), 2.59% in edge intensity (EI), and 1.99% in visual information fidelity (VIF), demonstrating superior performance in extreme low-light scenarios. The framework effectively suppresses thermal diffusion artifacts while mitigating exposure imbalance, adaptively brightening scenes while preserving texture details in shadowed regions. This significantly improves fusion quality for nighttime images by enhancing salient information, establishing a robust solution for multimodal perception under illumination-critical conditions. Full article

Infectious bronchitis virus (IBV) remains a major threat to poultry health worldwide due to frequent genetic changes mainly driven by recombination and limited cross-protection between genotypes. In this study, we analyzed IBV strains collected from clinical outbreaks in Chile between 1986 and 2021 to assess the long-term impacts of live-attenuated vaccines (Massachusetts and 4/91) on viral evolution. Phylogenetic analysis of the S1 and N genes revealed four major lineages circulating in Chile—GI-1, GI-13, GI-16, and a novel monophyletic clade we propose as GI-31. The latter, identified in isolates from 1986 to 1988, is highly divergent (22–24%) from other known lineages, representing a previously unreported South American IBV variant. Despite widespread Mass vaccination, genetically distinct field strains circulated during the 1980s, facilitating potential recombination with GI-1 vaccine-derived strains, including evidence of shared ancestry with GI-11, an endemic lineage from Brazil. Non-recombinant GI-16, likely introduced from Asia, was detected in isolates from 2009. Notably, a recombinant strain emerged in 2015, four years after 4/91 vaccine introduction, indicating vaccine–field-strain genetic exchange. By 2017, isolates with >99% identity to the 4/91 strain were recovered, suggesting vaccine-derived variants. In 2021, GI-1 re-emerged, showing recombination signatures between GI-1 and GI-13 (4/91-derived) strains, likely reflecting suboptimal or inconsistent vaccination strategies. Selection analyses showed strong purifying selection across most of the S1 gene, with limited sites under positive selection in the receptor-binding domain. Phylodynamic reconstruction revealed time-structured evolution and multiple introduction events over 35 years, with lineage-specific tMRCA estimates. Collectively, these findings highlight the emergence of a novel lineage in South America and demonstrate that vaccine use, while mitigating disease, has significantly shaped the evolution of IBV in Chile. Our results underscore the importance of continuous genomic surveillance to inform vaccine strategies and limit recombinant emergence. Full article

Bacterial leaf streak (BLS), caused by Xanthomonas translucens pv. undulosa, has become an intermittent yet economically significant disease of wheat in the Upper Midwest during the last decade. Because chemical and cultural controls remain ineffective, breeders rely on developing resistant varieties, yet visual ratings in inoculated nurseries are labor-intensive, subjective, and time-consuming. To accelerate this process, we combined unmanned-aerial-vehicle hyperspectral imaging (UAV-HSI) with a carefully tuned chemometric workflow that delivers rapid, objective estimates of disease severity. Principal component analysis cleanly separated BLS, leaf rust, and Fusarium head blight, with the first component explaining 97.76% of the spectral variance, demonstrating in-field pathogen discrimination. Pre-processing of the hyperspectral cubes, followed by robust Partial Least Squares (RPLS) regression, improved model reliability by managing outliers and heteroscedastic noise. Four variable-selection strategies—Variable Importance in Projection (VIP), Interval PLS (iPLS), Recursive Weighted PLS (rPLS), and Genetic Algorithm (GA)—were evaluated; rPLS provided the best balance between parsimony and accuracy, trimming the predictor set from 244 to 29 bands. Informative wavelengths clustered in the near-infrared and red-edge regions, which are linked to chlorophyll loss and canopy water stress. The best model, RPLS with optimal preprocessing and variable selection based on the rPLS method, showed high predictive accuracy, achieving a cross-validated R² of 0.823 and cross-validated RMSE of 7.452, demonstrating its effectiveness for detecting and quantifying BLS. We also explored the spectral overlap with Sentinel-2 bands, showing how UAV-derived maps can nest within satellite mosaics to link plot-level scouting to landscape-scale surveillance. Together, these results lay a practical foundation for breeders to speed the selection of resistant lines and for agronomists to monitor BLS dynamics across multiple spatial scales. Full article

Since December 2019, the COVID-19 pandemic caused by SARS-CoV-2 has reached approximately 769 million people, leading to more than 7 million deaths worldwide. Faced with the possibility of other respiratory pathogens co-infecting patients and modifying their clinical response to SARS-CoV-2, some researchers have explored this line of investigation. The relationship between these co-infections remains unclear, underscoring the need to deepen our understanding of interactions among pathogens and between pathogens and the host. Thus, the present study employed RT-qPCR to assess the presence of Human Adenovirus (HAdV), Influenza A (Flu A), Influenza B (Flu B), Human Metapneumovirus (HMPV), Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV), Human Rhinovirus (HRV), and Parainfluenza Virus (PIV). Nasopharyngeal samples (187) from adult patients exhibiting respiratory symptoms were collected between February 2021 and November 2022 at the University Hospital Polydoro Ernani de São Thiago in Florianópolis, SC, Brazil. The present findings revealed that 25.16% of samples tested positive for non-SARS-CoV-2 respiratory viruses (29.8%—HRV; 5.3%—PIV; 4.3%—RSV; and 1.1%—HMPV). In the 74.84% of SARS-CoV-2-positive patients, co-infection was observed in 9.7% of patients, with 7.5% being HRV, 1.1% HAdV, and 1.1% Influenza A. Since co-infections can potentially alter patient prognoses and impact local epidemiological dynamics, this study highlights the significance of ongoing monitoring and epidemiological assessment through genomic surveillance of other clinically relevant respiratory pathogens. Full article

CHIKV is a re-emerging mosquito-borne arthritogenic alphavirus associated with large outbreaks and severe joint pain, and it poses a growing global health threat. Toll-like receptors (TLRs), as key pattern recognition receptors, detect viral components and initiate antiviral immune responses. Increasing evidence highlights the role of TLR signaling in shaping CHIKV infection outcomes, though its precise contribution remains unclear. CHIKV has developed mechanisms to evade host innate immune surveillance, promoting viral replication. TLR agonists show promise as vaccine adjuvants by enhancing immune responses. In this review, we summarize current insights into TLR-mediated immunity during CHIKV infection, the virus’s innate immune evasion strategies, and the potential of TLR agonists in improving vaccine efficacy. Full article

One Health Observatories operationalize the One Health approach. The One Health Joint Plan of Action drafted by the Quadripartite (WHO, FAO, WOAH, and UNEP) insists on the need to strengthen scientific evidence-based knowledge and its translation into data for evidence, technical tools, protocols, guidelines, and information and surveillance systems for the effective implementation of One Health at all levels. One Health Observatories are crucial for this task. Drawing from the experience of the existing One Health Observatory in Thailand—a unique, on-the-ground initiative—we outline the key features of this model for potential replication in other regions or countries. Such observatories play a critical role in advancing ecosystem-based innovations and locally adapted solutions, which are necessary to improve the prevention of disease transmission at the interface between human, animal, and ecosystem health. Full article

Person re-identification (Re-ID) has attracted considerable attention in the field of computer vision, primarily due to its critical role in video surveillance and public security applications. However, most existing Re-ID approaches rely on image-level erasing techniques, which may inadvertently remove fine-grained visual cues that are essential for accurate identification. To mitigate this limitation, we propose an effective feature erasing-based data augmentation framework that aims to explore discriminative information within individual samples and improve overall recognition performance. Specifically, we first introduce a diagonal swapping augmentation strategy to increase the diversity of the training samples. Secondly, we design a feature erasing-driven method applied to the extracted pedestrian feature to capture identity-relevant information at the feature level. Finally, extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves competitive performance compared to many representative approaches. Full article

The aim of this study was to explore the prevalence of ESBL and carbapenemase genes in Gram-negative bacteria isolated from various clinical samples collected from northern regions of UAE. In total 3670 clinical samples were obtained from patients attending various hospitals and clinics in the northern regions of the UAE. All the samples underwent routine bacterial culture examination, and their antibiotic sensitivity patterns mainly on beta-lactam and carbapenem resistance in Gram-negative bacteria. Molecular detection of ESBL and carbapenemase genes (bla_CTX-M, bla_TEM, bla_SHV, bla_NDM, bla_IMP, and bla_OXA-48) was performed on them. A total of 249 MDR Gram-negative bacteria (E. coli, K. pneumoniae, P. aeruginosa, P. mirabilis and A. baumannii) were isolated. The genes bla_CTX-M, bla_TEM, and bla_SHV were detected in all the MDR isolates. Among them, the bla_CTX-M was predominant especially in E. coli. The bla_NDM and bla_IMP were detected in a few K. pneumoniae and A. baumannii. The genes combination bla_CTX-M+TEM and bla_CTX-M+SHV, bla_CTX-M+SHV, bla_TEM+SHV, and bla_TEM+NDM were detected mostly in K. pneumoniae and E. coli, and few A. baumannii. The gene combination bla_{CTX-M+TEM+SHV} and bla_{CTX-M+TEM+SHV+IMP} were also detected in few E. coli, P. aeruginosa, and A. baumannii. The current findings highlight the importance of molecular detection of ESBL and carbapenemase genes to emphasize monitoring and controlling the development of MDR bacterial pathogens. Full article

Background: The prevalence of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is increasing worldwide, while the incidence is tending to stabilize. Moreover, the use of biological treatments is increasing; some studies suggest that surgeries and hospitalizations are decreasing instead. Methods: A population-based, retrospective cohort study was conducted using data from the Catalan Health Surveillance System (CHSS). All patients diagnosed with IBD were included between 2017 and 2023. Crude incidence and prevalence rates were calculated for the Catalan population. Data on pharmacological therapy, surgical procedures, hospitalizations, and mortality were analyzed. Trends in age-sex-adjusted rates were also estimated, and logistic regression was used to calculate the adjusted mortality odds ratio (OR). Data for Crohn’s disease (CD) and ulcerative colitis (UC) were analyzed separately. Results: The number of prevalent IBD cases rose from 28,752 in 2017 to 41,423 in 2023. Despite incidence rates remaining stable (30.8 in 2017 and 29.9 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2023), prevalence rates increased (386.9 and 510.9 per 100,000 inhabitants, respectively). The use of biologics significantly increased (from 13.5% in 2017 to 21.0% in 2023), particularly ustekinumab and vedolizumab. In parallel, a decline in the use of immunosuppressants was observed. IBD-related surgeries and hospitalizations decreased during the study period, particularly among CD patients. Mortality remained low but was higher among IBD patients compared to the general population. Conclusions: The incidence of IBD in Catalonia has stabilized, while its prevalence continues rising, suggesting a transition to Stage 3 (compounding prevalence). The use of biological treatments is increasing steadily, whereas rates of surgeries and hospitalizations are consistently decreasing. Full article