It has been observed in several settings that schistosomiasis is less prevalent in segments of river with fast current than in those with slow current. Some believe that this can be attributed to flush-away of intermediate host snails. However, free-swimming parasite larvae are very active in searching for suitable hosts, which indicates that the flush-away of larvae may also be very important....

One hundred and twenty children with acute uncomplicated malaria who were managed at the children's outpatient department of the Wesley Guild Hospital, Ilesa (a unit of Obafemi Awolowo University Teaching Hospitals' Complex, Ile-Ife, Osun state, Nigeria) were recruited into the study to determine the effects of lime juice on malaria parasite clearance. These children were randomized into treatm...

This work demonstrates that environmental conditions experienced by individuals can shape their development and affect the stability of genetic associations. The implication of this observation is that the environmental response may influence the evolution of traits in the wild. Here, we examined how the genetic architecture of a suite of sexually dimorphic traits changed as a function of envir...

Proliferative kidney disease (PKD), caused by the myxozoan parasite Tetracapsuloides bryosalmonae, is well documented as a seasonal disease of rainbow trout Oncorhynchus mykiss. Water temperatures influence the course of the infection both within the fish and the invertebrate host, the recovery of fish from the disease being accelerated with decreasing water temperatures. During this study, gro...

The maintenance of sexual reproduction in the face of its supposed costs is a major paradox in evolutionary biology. The Red Queen hypothesis, which states that sex is an adaptation to fast-evolving parasites, is currently one of the most recognized explanations for the ubiquity of sex and predicts that asexual lineages should suffer from a higher parasite load if they coexist with closely rela...

Empirical studies suggest that most exotic species have fewer parasite species in their introduced range relative to their native range. However, it is less clear how, ecologically, the loss of parasite species translates into a measurable advantage for invaders relative to native species in the new community. We compared parasitism at three levels (species richness, abundance and impact) for a...

1-Hydroxy-2-dodecyl-4(1H)quinolone (HDQ) was recently identified as a Toxoplasma gondii inhibitor. We describe here two novel 1-hydroxyquinolones, which displayed 50% inhibitory concentrations 10- and 5-fold lower than that of HDQ. In a mouse model of acute toxoplasmosis, these two compounds and HDQ reduced the percentages of infected peritoneal cells and decreased the parasite loads in lungs a...

In many species male sexual characteristics are known to be affected negatively by parasites, which render their hosts unattractive to females, but how parasites affect the mating decisions of their female hosts has received little attention. The monogenean parasite Gyrodactylus turnbulli reduces the sexual display and colour intensity of male guppies, Poecilia reticulata, which makes them less...

To better understand the spread of disease in nature, it is fundamentally important to have broadly applicable model systems with readily available species which can be replicated and controlled in the laboratory. Here we used an experimental model system of fish hosts and monogenean parasites to determine whether host sex, group size and group composition (single-sex or mixed-sex) influenced h...