Circulatory and Lymphatic System Infections

Yellow fever was once common in the southeastern US, with annual outbreaks of more than 25,000 infections in New Orleans in the mid-1800s (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “The History of Yellow Fever,” http://www.cdc.gov/travel-training/local/HistoryEpidemiologyandVaccination/page27568.html). In the early 20th century, efforts to eradicate the virus that causes yellow fever were successful thanks to vaccination programs and effective control (mainly through the insecticide dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane [DDT]) of Aedes aegypti, the mosquito that serves as a vector. Today, the virus has been largely eradicated in North America.

Elsewhere, efforts to contain yellow fever have been less successful. Despite mass vaccination campaigns in some regions, the risk for yellow fever epidemics is rising in dense urban cities in Africa and South America (C.L. Gardner, K.D. Ryman, “Yellow Fever: A Reemerging Threat,” Clinical Laboratory Medicine 30, no. 1 [2010]: 237–260). In an increasingly globalized society, yellow fever could easily make a comeback in North America, where A. aegypti is still present. If these mosquitoes were exposed to infected individuals, new outbreaks would be possible.

Like yellow fever, many of the circulatory and lymphatic diseases discussed in this chapter are emerging or re-emerging worldwide. Despite medical advances, diseases like malaria, Ebola, and others could become endemic in the US given the right circumstances.

Sections

• Anatomy of the Circulatory and Lymphatic Systems — the major anatomical features of the circulatory system (the heart, arteries, veins, and capillaries) and the lymphatic system (lymph nodes, the spleen, and the thymus), why these systems lack normal microbiota, how microorganisms overcome their defenses to cause infection, and the general signs and symptoms of circulatory and lymphatic disease, including bacteremia, septicemia, viremia, toxemia, sepsis, endocarditis, pericarditis, myocarditis, vasculitis, lymphangitis, and lymphadenitis.
• Bacterial Infections of the Circulatory and Lymphatic Systems — bacterial sepsis and septic and toxic shock, toxic shock syndrome and streptococcal toxic shock-like syndrome, puerperal sepsis, infectious arthritis, osteomyelitis, rheumatic fever, bacterial endocarditis and pericarditis, gas gangrene, the zoonotic diseases tularemia, brucellosis, cat-scratch disease, rat-bite fever, and plague, and the vector-borne zoonotic febrile diseases anaplasmosis, ehrlichiosis, epidemic and murine typhus, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, Lyme disease, relapsing fever, and trench fever.
• Viral Infections of the Circulatory and Lymphatic Systems — infectious mononucleosis and Burkitt lymphoma caused by Epstein-Barr virus, cytomegalovirus infections, the arthropod-borne viral diseases yellow fever, dengue fever, and chikungunya fever, Ebola virus disease, hantavirus infections, and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection and AIDS.
• Parasitic Infections of the Circulatory and Lymphatic Systems — the protozoan diseases malaria, toxoplasmosis, babesiosis, Chagas disease, and leishmaniasis, and the helminthic disease schistosomiasis, including the cercarial dermatitis (swimmer’s itch) caused by non-human schistosome species.

This chapter is adapted from Microbiology, Chapter 25: Circulatory and Lymphatic System Infections by Nina Parker, Mark Schneegurt, Anh-Hue Thi Tu, Philip Lister, Brian M. Forster, and OpenStax, © OpenStax, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Access the original for free at openstax.org. Each section page records its own changes from the source. Changes: the chapter-opening figure is the source’s two-panel photo of a jaundiced person’s eyes and a blood-engorged mosquito, re-encoded for the web, with its alt text rewritten to describe what is actually visible; the module marks “yellow fever” and “Aedes aegypti” as terms (class no-emphasis, so the source itself gives them no visual styling), which are rendered here as plain prose; the module’s two footnotes are rendered as inline parenthetical citations.