Bacterial profiling of head lice isolated from the Orang Asli: A first report in Malaysia

Molecular survey of head lice (Pediculus humanus capitis) infestation among disadvantaged children in Klang Valley, Malaysia

“…Despite the vector status of head lice in the transmission of pathogens to humans is not fully understood, there are increasing reports on the detection of pathogenic bacteria in head lice. Acinetobacter baumannii (Bouvresse et al, 2011;Kempf et al, 2012;Sunantaraporn et al, 2015;Mokhtar et al, 2019;Abd Majid et al, 2020), Bartonella recurrentis (Boutellis et al, 2013;Amanzougaghene et al, 2016), Bartonella quintana (Sasaki et al, 2006;Bonilla et al, 2009;Angelakis et al, 2011) and Serratia marcescens (Mokhtar et al, 2019) are amongst human pathogens that have been reported in the literature, suggesting head lice as a potential environmental reservoir posing a health threat to the infested children. Current data on the genetic variation of COI of head lice in Malaysia are scarce and to our knowledge, only one such study was conducted by Mokhtar et al (2019).…”