Tropical skin disease survey reveals global hotspots

UNSW: The first ever international review of scabies and impetigo has indentified global hotspots and revealed children are disproportionately affected by the debilitating infectious conditions. The systematic review, led by UNSW’s Kirby Institute with collaborators, analysed findings from 48 surveys, mostly from developing countries in the Pacific, Latin America and Africa. The results were published today in The Lancet Infectious Diseases journal.

what bugs can you catch from your pets?

TheConversation: Household pets are often a great source of joy and have positive effects on our mental well-being. For most of us, this outweighs the risk of coming into contact with any bugs they may carry.
Household pets can host a number of organisms that cause parasitic, bacterial, fungal and viral diseases in humans. These animal-to-human diseases are known as zoonoses. Bites and scratches from pets can lead to diseases such as pasterurellosis and cat-scratch disease; while psittacosis or parrot fever is contracted when humans breathe in aerosolised droplets containing secretions from infected birds. But the most common zoonotic diseases come from parasites and bacteria that are transmitted through the gastrointestinal route – by touching the pet or litter tray and then your mouth. Don’t worry, the risk of catching these diseases can usually be mitigated by washing your hands.

Efficacy of Handwashing with Soap and Nail Clipping on Intestinal Parasitic Infections in School-Aged Children

Plos: Intestinal parasitic infections are common human infections, particularly in resource-limited countries, where personal hygiene and access to clean water and sanitation (disposal of human feces and urine) is often poor. Worldwide, more than a billion people are infected with soil-transmitted helminths—roundworms, tapeworms, and other parasitic worms that live in the human intestine (gut). And millions of people are infected with protozoan (single-celled) intestinal parasites that cause diseases such as amebiasis and giardiasis. Both helminths and protozoan parasites are mainly spread by the fecal-oral route.

Enlisting mHealth in the Fight Against River Blindness

NIH: When it comes to devising new ways to provide state-of-the art medical care to people living in remote areas of the world, smartphones truly are helping scientists get smarter. For example, an NIH-supported team working in Central Africa recently turned an iPhone into a low-cost video microscope capable of quickly testing to see if people infected with a parasitic worm called Loa loa can safely receive a drug intended to protect them from a different, potentially blinding parasitic disease.

What is Chagas disease?

TheConversation: According to an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), in a Los Angeles clinic treating patients with heart failure, about 20% of Latin American patients have Chagas disease. What is that?, you might wonder. Chagas is a parasitic infection that is endemic in 21 countries in Central and South America and affects an estimated 6-7 million people worldwide. This disease is one of several so-called neglected tropical infectious diseases that have significant worldwide morbidity (the incidence of a disease) and mortality. It can, as the JAMA article suggests, lead to severe health complications. But in the US, the disease is relatively rare, though incidence is starting to increase.

Smartphone app used to scan blood for parasites

NHS: "A smartphone has been used to automatically detect wriggling parasites in blood samples," BBC News reports. It is hoped the customised device could help in programmes to get rid of parasites in parts of Africa. In certain regions of Africa, two parasitic diseases – river blindness and elephantiasis – are a major health problem affecting millions. Both of these diseases can be treated with a drug called ivermectin. But if you give somebody ivermectin and they also have high numbers of a less harmful parasite called Loa loa (African eye worm) inside their body, it can trigger potentially deadly side effects. This has hampered large-scale ivermectin treatment programmes aimed at eradicating river blindness and elephantiasis in some areas,  as people need to have time-consuming tests for Loa loa levels before they can be treated. The new device – a standard iPhone hooked up to a specially designed lens module – allows people with minimal training to quickly measure Loa loa levels in a sample of blood.

Understanding the body’s response to worms and allergies

Manchester: Research from The University of Manchester is bringing scientists a step closer to developing new therapies for controlling the body’s response to allergies and parasitic worm infections. In a paper published in Nature Communications, Pr Andrew MacDonald discovered a new way that immune cells control inflammation during worm infection or an allergic response like asthma. It’s important to understand how this type of inflammation is controlled as it can be very damaging and in some cases lead to long term conditions.

Possible strategy identified to combat leishmaniasis, a major parasitic tropical disease

St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital (US) scientists report results that suggest neutralizing a single protein may aid fight against a parasitic tropical disease that annually sickens more than 1.3 million people worldwide.

Corticosteroids for the treatment of parasitic eosinophilic meningitis

Cochrane: Do corticosteroids reduce inflammation in the membrane of the brain caused by parasites? Eosinophilic meningitis is an inflammation of the membrane covering the brain, the causes of which can be broadly categorised into infectious and non-infectious. Among the infectious aetiologies, Angiostrongylus cantonensis, a rat lung worm, is the major cause of eosinophilic meningitis.

Genetic code cracked for worldwide dog and human parasite

Melbourne University. Australia: For the first time, scientists have sequenced the genetic code of Toxocara canis, a roundworm that causes disease in humans and animals, which paves the way for new drugs, vaccines and diagnostic tests.

This parasite causes toxocariasis, a disease that mainly affects young children and is of worldwide socioeconomic importance as hundreds of millions of humans across the world are potentially exposed to the roundworm T. canis.  It can also be fatal to young puppies, especially if untreated, when hundreds of worms up to 15 centimeters in length can pack out the entire small intestines.

How Malaria-Spreading Mosquitoes Can Tell You’re Home

UC Riverside (US) research shows house-dwelling mosquitoes require minute changes in concentrations of exhaled carbon dioxide to trigger landing on human skin.

Bed nets and vaccines: Some combinations may worsen malaria

University of Michigan. US: Combining insecticide-treated bed nets with vaccines and other control measures may provide the best chance at eliminating malaria, which killed nearly 600,000 people worldwide in 2013, most of them African children.

Genetics underpinning antimalarial drug resistance revealed

Sanger Institute. UK: Largest genome-wide study of parasite provides clearest picture yet of genetic changes driving artemisinin resistance. The largest genome-wide association study to date of the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum unveils a complex genetic architecture that enables the parasite to develop resistance to our most effective antimalarial drug, artemisinin. The results could help to improve early detection of emerging artemisinin resistance.

Scientists Identify Important Mechanism Involved in Production of Mosquito Eggs

UC Riverside (US) research on mosquitoes could lead to innovative strategies for controlling mosquito populations. Diseases transmitted by mosquitoes have contributed to the death and suffering of millions throughout human history, earning the mosquito the title as the world’s most dangerous animal.

Century-Old Drug Reverses Autism-like Symptoms in Fragile X Mouse Model

UCSD. US: Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) affect 1 to 2 percent of children in the United States. Hundreds of genetic and environmental factors have been shown to increase the risk of ASD. Researchers at UC San Diego School of Medicine previously reported that a drug used for almost a century to treat trypanosomiasis, or sleeping sickness, reversed environmental autism-like symptoms in mice.

Trypanosomiasis

WHO: Human African trypanosomiasis or sleeping sickness is a widespread tropical disease that can be fatal if not treated. It is spread by the bite of an infected tsetse fly (Glossina Genus).
The tsetse fly bite erupts into a red sore and within a few weeks the person can experience fever, swollen lymph glands, aching muscles and joints, headaches and irritability.
In advanced stages, the disease attacks the central nervous system, causing changes in personality, alteration of the biological clock (the circadian rhythm), confusion, slurred speech, seizures, and difficulty walking and talking. These problems can develop over many years in the Gambiense form and some months in the Rhodesiense form; if not treated, the person will die.
Control of sleeping sickness is based on reduction of the reservoirs of infection by early diagnosis and control of tsetse flies.

New strains of parasites identified

McGill. Canada: Research on whipworms has implications for human health and animal conservation. About 600 million people around the world live with whipworms. Most are children in the developing world, whose physical and mental development is stunted by these gastrointestinal parasites.

Veterinary medications should not be used for treating head lice in children

ANSES. France: Following a recent report of the use of veterinary medications to treat head lice in children, ANSES wishes to emphasise that antiparasitic, insecticide and acaracide treatments intended for pets should never be used on humans, especially children.

Head lice

CDC. US: Adult head lice are roughly 2–3 mm long. Head lice infest the head and neck and attach their eggs to the base of the hair shaft. Lice move by crawling; they cannot hop or fly.
Head lice infestation, or pediculosis, is spread most commonly by close person-to-person contact. Dogs, cats, and other pets do not play a role in the transmission of human lice.
Both over-the-counter and prescription medications are available for treatment of head lice infestations.

Study Links Common Human Protein to Adverse Parasitic Worm Infections

UC Riverside-led research could lead to new therapies for parasitic worm infections currently afflicting an estimated two billion people worldwide.