Anthrax mite
| Anthrax mite | ||||||||||||
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| Systematics | ||||||||||||
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| Scientific name | ||||||||||||
| Sarcoptes anthracis | ||||||||||||
| Dmitri Ivanovsky , 1901 |
The anthrax mite ( Sarcoptes anthracis ) is the causative agent of a skin disease in cloven-hoofed animals.
The anthrax mite was first discovered in 1900 in an Asian crested deer female and described and classified a year later by Dmitri Iwanowski . The representative belonging to the genus of parasitic mites is about 235 µm long, up to 210 µm wide and can be found almost exclusively on cloven-hoofed animals . Like all grave mites , these representatives also live under the epidermis of their hosts and lay their eggs in specially created drill holes. Their offspring transmit the Bacillus anthracis to the host organism, which lives in the digestive tract of the mites, but does not have any negative effects on the arachnids themselves. Mites infest weakened animals more frequently and cause a deterioration in the host's immune status. The additional infection with anthrax leads in almost all cases to the death of the host organism. Because of the relatively high host specificity, only a few cases of transmission of the disease by anthrax mites in other animal species apart from the cloven-hoofed animals are known to date, but due to the toxicity of the spores, the infestation of breeding animals in Russia is a notifiable disease . Several cases of anthrax mites appeared on Canadian reindeer herding farms in America in the late 1950s, but no major sources of infection have been reported since then.
literature
- Theodor Hiepe: Textbook of Parasitology, Volume 1 . Fischer-Verlag, Jena 1983, ISBN 3-437-20252-9 , pp. 367-368.
- Michael Madigan, John M. Martinko: Brock Biology of Microorganisms . 9th Ed. Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ 1991, ISBN 0-13-144329-1 , pp. 233-235.
