Chronic chagasic cardiomyopathy (CCC) develops years after acute infection by Trypanosoma cruzi and does not improve after trypanocidal therapy, despite reduction of parasite burden. During disease, the heart undergoes oxidative stress, a potential causative factor for arrhythmias and contractile dysfunction. Here we tested whether antioxidants/ cardioprotective drugs could improve cardiac func...

conclusions artemether especially in oral treatment is an effective and simple method and may be used as a new method to treat visceral leishmaniasis. results ic50 of the drug on leishmania infantum was determined to be 25 μg/ml after 24 h. in vivo experiments indicated that oral artemether treatment of mice, during 3 days and every 6 h (0.625 mg/kg) was more significant than parenteral (0.625 ...

background: limiting dilution assay is considered as the gold standard method for quantifying the number of parasites in the animal model of leishmania infection. nowadays, real-time pcr is being increasingly applied to quantify infectious agents. in the present study , a real-time pcr assay was developed to estimate para­site burdens in lymph nodes of leishmania major infected balb/c mice. enu...

The balance between controlling infection and limiting inflammation is particularly precarious in the brain because of its unique vulnerability to the toxic effects of inflammation. Astrocytes have been implicated as key regulators of neuroinflammation in CNS infections, including infection with Toxoplasma gondii, a protozoan parasite that naturally establishes a chronic CNS infection in mice a...

Leishmaniasis causes significant morbidity and mortality worldwide, and no vaccines against this disease are available. Previously, we had shown that the amastigote-specific protein p27 (Ldp27) is a component of an active cytochrome c oxidase complex in Leishmania donovani and that upon deletion of its gene the parasite had reduced virulence in vivo. In this study, we have shown that Ldp27(-/-)...

stool examinations of 402 inhabitants of 8 villages in and around an area near zahedan, and 280 people who had emigrated from the rural area of zabol, revealed the following: the prevalence of infection with ascaris, trichuris and trichostrongylus was very low (less than 5%) in all areas surveyed, while the mean infection rates found for h.nana, hookworm and e.vermicularis (by stool examination...

Infected hosts may preserve fitness by resisting parasites (reducing parasite burden) and/or tolerating them (preventing or repairing infection-induced damage). Theory predicts that these individual-level defense strategies generate divergent population-level feedbacks that would maintain genetic heterogeneity for resistance but purge heterogeneity for tolerance. Because resistance reduces para...