Word: schistosoma
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Xinmin is a village on the verge of extinction. Nearly every resident of this swampy, 1,000-strong hamlet in the central Chinese province of Hunan is infected by the parasitic worm Schistosoma japonicum. It spreads through the bloodstream, lays eggs in the liver and bladder, wriggles into the brain or embeds itself in the spine. Renal failure and paralysis may follow; death is painful and untimely. That is the grim fate awaiting Xinmin villager Wang Zengkun. The 45-year-old rice farmer first experienced the stomach cramps and bloody diarrhea that signal schistosomiasis three years ago. For a while...
...Half a century ago, Chairman Mao Zedong, himself a native of Hunan province, declared war on the diseases ravaging China's countryside. One of his major battles was against the fearsome Schistosoma fluke, which infected 12 million Chinese in 1949 and, according to the World Health Organization (who), is still the world's second-most-debilitating parasitic disease, after malaria. Employing troops of pesticide-wielding workers to eradicate snails and offering free health checkups and medicine for all those living in the schistosomiasis-prone Yangtze River region, China slashed the number of victims to 2.5 million...
...ornaments inside his cramped quarters is a portrait of antidisease crusader Chairman Mao. Outside, the ground is littered with the shells of snails whose worms infect workers in warmer weather. Song's drinking and washing water, drawn from a brackish pit by his hut, also teems with Schistosoma worms in the summer. Naturally, Song has been diagnosed with snail fever. He doesn't feel the symptoms yet, but he knows they will come?as they have for nearly everyone he knows...
...single patient. The patients had been excreting thousands of eggs a day; after the operation, ten excreted no more eggs, suggesting that all the mated flukes had been filtered out of their systems, and seven others showed great improvement. Though it was developed specifically for the fluke Schistosoma mansoni, common in South America and Africa, Drs. Kean and Goldsmith believe the technique can be adapted to remove both the Asiatic form, which causes an even more severe disease, and a variety that is common in the Near East and exposes Africans to double jeopardy...
...Schistosoma parasites hatch in water, then have a complex life cycle: they enter the body of a snail, progress to a second larval form, then emerge and enter the human body either by mouth or through the skin. In man they cause a lifelong debilitating disease marked by coughs, rashes, blood in the urine, fever and nausea; eventually they attack the liver, lungs, spleen and brain...