Overall, 8% of the opossums had positive fleas when fleas were tested individually, compared with 21% when flea pools (50 pools; <20 fleas/pool/opossum) were used.
All ticks and cat fleas were tested negative by PCR for Rickettsia spp., B. henselae and Ehrlichia spp. In PICTs, rickettsioses, Q fever, bartonelloses and ehrlichioses are not included in the list of nationally notifiable diseases.
Subsequently, the toxicity of the vitrifying solutions at 0 °C towards asexual eggs of the water flea was tested.
Plague was tested for by plating tissue samples (gerbils) or pools of fleas on Hottinger's agar containing 1% haemolyzed sheep erythrocytes.
Flea samples were tested for Bartonella spp. DNA by using the 7900 HT Fast Quantitative Real-Time PCR System (Applied Biosystems, Foster City, CA, USA) and primers and Taqman probes specific for the 16S 23S rRNA gene intergenic spacer region as described (5 ).
A systemic pesticide, imidacloprid, commonly used on sucking insects like aphids and fleas, is being tested for effectiveness by the Agriculture Department.
After an outbreak of human plague, 95 Xenopsylla cheopis fleas from Algeria were tested for Yersinia pestis with PCR methods.
Positive fleas for Rickettsia DNA were tested subsequently with primers and probe targeting a chromosomal gene specific of R. felis bioB, as described previously [30].
Not all fleas collected from Borneo Island were tested, we limited our molecular analysis to a maximum of five fleas per sampled dog and a total of 360 samples.
Ten pools of five randomly selected fleas collected from the voles were tested for Bartonella spp. DNA using the gltA PCR.
The global-fit congruence and individual host-parasite interaction analysis were tested with 100,000 permutations using zokor distance matrix, flea distance matrix, and the zokor-flea association file.
