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The World Is Closer Than Ever to Eradicating Guinea Worm

washingtonpost.com

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Re: The World Is Closer Than Ever to Eradicating Guinea Worm

#41

Post by appleflaxen »

lovemenot wrote: post #28
praptak wrote: post #10

I wonder how much danger there is of the worm finding a new host species. I mean an animal other than dog and possibly harder to control. That would be a disastrous outcome.

Little danger, I guess. The eradication program introduces no new evolutionary pressure on worms' lavae living in water. Those filtered out or killed in their hosts are removed from the gene pool anyway. On the other hand, we may discover more such preexisting hosts, as dogs. A parasitic relationship that evolved over a much longer period than a few mere decades and evolving from a much larger population than the few…

> introduces no new evolutionary pressure on worms' lavae living in water

not being able to reproduce (by infecting a human, which is required in the reproductive cycle) is just as real of a new evolutionary pressure as dying is.

Re: The World Is Closer Than Ever to Eradicating Guinea Worm

#42

Post by woliveirajr »

> There is no vaccine for Guinea worm, because the parasite induces no immune response.

So, eradicating it might lead to the loss of some knowledge, on how it doesn't trigger some immune response. Specially because if you pull the worm, it retracts and causes infection, so the mechanism might not be that simple.

Even more: few years ago (2013) [1], it was expected that soon it would have been eliminated, because dogs had their own species of guinea worm and wouldn't substitute human beings as the necessarily step in the worm life cycle.

[1] http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/01/24/the-guine...

Re: The World Is Closer Than Ever to Eradicating Guinea Worm

#43

Post by bertil »

Aelinsaar wrote: post #26
bertil wrote: post #12

I remember a story about a worm that is extracted using a stick: the worm is presented with the stick, wrap itself around it and you can pull it out. Presumably, that image of a long animal around a stick as a healing process is what gave the caducean, the symbol to medicine of a snake around a stick. Anyone familiar with anything like this?

I would suggest that you not google image search that, as I did. There are many modern results, and it's quite awful.

Yup: girlfriend is an MD, I learnt the hard way to deactivate Google Image before any medical search. I would ban any relation to dermatology from GI if I could.

Re: The World Is Closer Than Ever to Eradicating Guinea Worm

#44

Post by Aelinsaar »

bertil wrote: post #43
Aelinsaar wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would suggest that you not google image search that, as I did. There are many modern results, and it's quite awful.

Yup: girlfriend is an MD, I learnt the hard way to deactivate Google Image before any medical search. I would ban any relation to dermatology from GI if I could.

Oh god yes. My "Cannot unsee" file is overwhelmingly dermatological, or burns.
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