The nervous system of flatworms is quite simple although there is increasing evidence indicating that it is chemically complex. Studies of the nervous system in these animals have only been performed in the larval stage or in the adult worms, which are easy to obtain in nature, while the description of the nervous system in developing stages of these organisms is missing. Mesocestoides corti is...

Host biodiversity can impact disease risk and influence the transmission of parasitic disease. Stream sediment-dwelling worms, Tubifex tubifex (Clitellata: Oligochaeta), are the definitive host of the parasite Myxobolus cerebralis (Myxozoa: Myxosporea), which causes whirling disease in salmonid fishes. Genetic diversity of T. tubifex is correlated with host susceptibility to M. cerebralis , and...

Helminths are multicellular parasitic worms that comprise a major class of human pathogens and cause an immense amount of suffering worldwide. Helminths possess an abundance of complex and unique glycoconjugates that interact with both the innate and adaptive arms of immunity in definitive and intermediate hosts. These glycoconjugates represent a major untapped reservoir of immunomodulatory com...

The contributions of Brazilian physicians to knowledge of diseases caused by parasitic worms, during the second half of the nineteenth century, had distinct effects on three epistemic communities: Brazilian clinical anatomy, French medical geography, and the emerging field of medical parasitology. Accepting the heterogeneity of both the systems for legitimizing scientific facts and the epistemo...

Biological control of parasitic nematodes of livestock is currently under development and represents another tool that may be integrated into helminth parasite control strategies. This paper presents a brief introduction to commercial sheep farming in South Africa and currently available nematode parasite control methods. These include the FAMACHA clinical assay, strategies of pasture managemen...

The transmission of many parasitic worms involves aggregated movement between hosts of "packets" of infectious larvae. We use a generic metapopulation model to show that this aggregation naturally promotes the preferential spread of rare recessive genes, compared with the expectations of traditional nonspatial models. A more biologically realistic model also demonstrates that this effect could ...

Many animals engage in many behaviors that reduce their exposure to pathogens. Ants line their nests with resins that inhibit the growth of fungi and bacteria (Chapuisat, Oppliger, Magliano, & Christe, 2008). Mice avoid mating with other mice that are infected with parasitic protozoa (Kavaliers & Colwell, 1995). Animals of many kinds—from physiologically primitive nematode worms to neurological...

Paramphistomoids are ubiquitous and widespread digeneans that infect a diverse range of definitive hosts, being particularly speciose in ruminants. We collected adult worms from cattle, goats and sheep from slaughterhouses, and cercariae from freshwater snails from ten localities in Central and West Kenya. We sequenced cox1 (690 bp) and internal transcribed region 2 (ITS2) (385 bp) genes from a...

Thelaziasis is an infestation caused by the parasite Thelazia which is transmitted from one host to another host by the intermediate host face fly. Face fly is a non-penetrate secretophagic or tear feeding flies of the genera Musca. Thelazia is a genus of parasitic round worms that affects the eyes of numerous domestic animals, including cattle, dogs, cats, sheep, goats and other livestock. Man...