Flooding provides an opportunity for epidemics of waterborne viral, protozoan, or bacterial diseases to develop in affected areas. May be, the only epidemic-prone infection which can be transmitted directly from contaminated water is leptospirosis, a zoonotic bacterial disease. Leptospirosis is commonly founded in bodies of water, moist soil, or vegetation contaminated by the urine or tissues of infected animals. Outbreaks of leptospirosis have occurred many times following flood events in different part of the world especially in India, Latin America and South-East Asia. Leptospirosis should be kept in mind of health workers and local administrators in every where even also developed regios and countries especially during the water associated nature events. Many of the leptospirosis symptoms can be mistaken for other epidemic prone diseases. So, spesific laboratuary methods are needed for accurate diagnosis. Both of medical facilities and medical personnels might be affected by natural disasters. Beyond of these, reason of a lot of leptospirosis cases and other water based contagious diseases, running of the complicated and time consuming or expensive tests could be impossible. So, preferring of the rapid tests like slide agglutination test or urine dipstick tests for leptospirosis diagnosis could be reasonable. Concisely, due to Leptospirosis is a water-borne disease and can often be overlooked, it should be kept in mind especially for patients presenting with fever and multi-organ involvement just after natural disasters like tsunami, land sliding, flooding, sudden or heavy reains. This fact is extremely important nowadays and in the future, because of ingreasingly aggravated global climatic change.
Key words: Leptospirosis, Leptospirae, natural disasters, flooding, climatic change Article Language: Turkish English
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