Q fever

Query fever (Q fever) is a serious old recognized poorly understood major anthropozoonosis distributed all over the world except in the Antarctic and New Zealand. Coxiella burnetii (the cause of Q fever) is a highly contagious Gram negative bacterium that was categorized under the class Gammaproteobacteria and showed ability to survive in the environment for long periods, infecting humans, many species of domestic and wild animals, domestic and wild birds, reptiles, ticks and even marine mammals. In Egypt, Q fever was not considered a potential problem till 1952 as demonstrated by the absence of reports on the disease in animals and man before that time. Few research are available about the disease in Egypt from that time reporting different human seroprevalence rates in different Governorates, indicating the endemicity of infection among Egyptian individuals. However, Q fever is one of neglected bacterial diseases in Egypt with a little attention is paid for the health education of the public about the danger of it, modes of spread, risk factors of acquiring and methods of the disease control.