Langenwalder, Denis B.
Schmidt, Sabine
Silaghi, Cornelia
Skuballa, Jasmin
Pantchev, Nikola
Matei, Ioana A.
Mihalca, Andrei D.
Gilli, Urs
Zajkowska, Joanna
Ganter, Martin
Hoffman, Tove
Salaneck, Erik
Petrovec, Miroslav
von Loewenich, Friederike D.
Article History
Received: 18 February 2020
Accepted: 29 April 2020
First Online: 7 May 2020
Change Date: 30 September 2020
Change Type: Correction
Change Details: An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via the original article.
Ethics approval and consent to participate
: The samples from humans, domestic and farm animals were obtained as part of routine diagnostic evaluations. Part of the ovine samples were collected for the Q-fever surveillance program of the federal state of Lower-Saxony. The red foxes were killed for the official rabies monitoring program of the federal state of Brandenburg. All other wild animals were shot by professional hunters during the annual hunting seasons. Hedgehogs from a captive population in the federal state of Baden-Württemberg and from hedgehog caretaking stations in various areas of Germany were bled from the saphenous vein or died naturally. None of the hedgehogs were sacrificed for this study. For Germany, permission to trap rodents was given by the District Government Stuttgart, Germany. For the UK, protocols for the handling and sampling of wild small mammals were approved by the University of Liverpool Committee on Research Ethics. For Romania, samples were collected based on permits issued by ARBDD. For Russia, rodent samples were kindly provided by the Institute of Plant and Animal Ecology (Yekaterinburg, Russia).
: Written informed consent was obtained from the patients and owners, respectively.
: The authors declare that they have no competing interests.