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Louseborne relapsing fever (LBRF) was once a cosmopolitan disease, but it now occurs only in the Horn of Africa. Recent cases in refugees to Europe made LBRF topical again. Crowded boarding houses and church dwellings in Ethiopia are analogous to the crowded air-raid shelters of World War II. Thus, we might learn from experiments the London School of Tropical Hygiene and Medicine conducted during World War II. When the vector of Borrelia recurrentis (Pediculus humanus lice) was held away from the host for 10 days, 100% of nymphal and adult lice starved to death and 100% of eggs did not hatch. We hypothesize that holding infested clothes away from hosts in plastic shopping bags will kill enough lice to control LBRF in Ethiopia. Owning 2 sets of clothes might be useful; 1 set might be held in a plastic shopping bag for 10 days to kill lice and their eggs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We establish a new subgenus, Filippoviella n. subgen. (Acari: Ixodidae) based on two species formerly assigned to the subgenus Exopalpiger Schulze, 1935 in the genus Ixodes Latreille, 1795. Ixodes (Filippoviella) trianguliceps Birula, 1895 is a tick species broadly distributed throughout Europe and western Siberia, the females, nymphs and larvae of which mostly feed on small mammals such as shrews and rodents. Ixodes (Filippoviella) ghilarovi Filippova & Panova, 1988 is found in the Caucasus region on rodents and shrews. The type species of this new subgenus is Ixodes trianguliceps. The major morphological differences allowing discrimination of the two species of Filippoviella n. subgen from members of the subgenus Exopalpiger are the shape of the idiosoma, shape of the basis capituli, development of palpal segment I, the suture between palpal segments II and III, development of syncoxae and chaetotaxy. We sequenced the entire mitochondrial genome of I. trianguliceps; according to our phylogeny from 10 protein-coding mitochondrial genes of 17 of the 23 Ixodes subgenera (34 spp.), I. (Filippoviella) trianguliceps is basal to the "other Ixodes" and polyphyletic with I. (Exopalpiger) fecialis Warburton & Nuttall, 1909.