| dissemination of spotted fever rickettsia agents in europe by migrating birds. | migratory birds are known to play a role as long-distance vectors for many microorganisms. to investigate whether this is true of rickettsial agents as well, we characterized tick infestation and gathered ticks from 13,260 migratory passerine birds in sweden. a total of 1127 ixodes spp. ticks were removed from these birds and the extracted dna from 957 of them was available for analyses. the dna was assayed for detection of rickettsia spp. using real-time pcr, followed by dna sequencing for spec ... | 2010 | 20052286 |