Abstract
A simple search query of the generalist biomedical database PubMed shows that about 5000 papers were published on ticks and tick-borne diseases between 1996 and 2006; this number has almost doubled in the last 10 years. The increasing interest in the research of ticks and tick-borne diseases has various causes, the main ones being climate and land-use change with the consequent change in vector distribution, the recognition of new medically important pathogens and the increasing economic, social and public health impact of vector-borne diseases. The medical importance of ticks resides mostly in their capacity to transmit a wide range of microbial (viruses, bacteria) and parasitic (protozoans, helminths) agents to their vertebrate hosts, including humans.
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Mihalca, A.D., Estrada-Peña, A., Petney, T.N. (2017). Introduction. In: Estrada-Peña, A., Mihalca, A., Petney, T. (eds) Ticks of Europe and North Africa. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63760-0_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63760-0_1
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