XXXX and heartwater: threats without boundaries.

@entity743 @entity291 @entity66 @entity281
Suppose one of your clients from southern Florida starts talking about @entity291 egrets while you are vaccinating her cat. It seems she found a nearly dead egret near the @entity291 pen a few days ago, picked it up, and noticed a number of what looked like small ticks on the legs. Or, suppose you are called out to a small dairy in central Texas to look at some @entity291 that are feverish and anemic. The first animal you examine has a few brown ticks attached just under the tail. Finally, perhaps you are looking at a lame tortoise for a reptile fancier, a new client, and find a large, colorful tick on a hind leg, well up under the shell. Ring any bells? Egrets are great hosts for the immature stages of Amblyomma ticks and have been captured and marked in the eastern Caribbean, then recaptured in the Florida Keys. Those @entity291 ticks in Texas might be acaricide-resistant Boophilus ticks that originated in Mexico. The Amblyomma tick on the tortoise could well have "hitch-hiked" all the way from South Africa. By now you remember that both Amblyomma and Boophilus ticks are efficient vectors of two @entity66 in this hemisphere, heartwater (in the case of Amblyomma) and @entity743 (transmitted by Boophilus ticks). Both of these diseases are exotic to the United States, and because our livestock are considered to be totally susceptible, an introduced @entity281 could result in high initial death losses (approximately 70%); thus, both the ticks and the diseases pose immediate threats to the health and economic security of United States animal industries. Most importantly, you, whether as a small animal or large animal practitioner, are the first line of defense against such exotic diseases and their vectors.
