Word: snails
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Four and twenty tailors went to kill a snail...
Cause of all the trouble is a wiggly tailed, microscopic larva that lives out its life as an unwelcome hitchhiker in both snails* and man. Hatched in fresh water, the schistosomal larva must invade a snail within about 24 hours or die. After weeks of development and change in the snail, the larvae move on and burrow into a human body, where they mature and mate in the bloodstream. Then they settle down to years devoted to depositing eggs in vital organs. The adult parasites live in an almost constant state of copulation and the female can produce...
Eradication of parasite-bearing snails is not one bit easier than attacking the worms in man. The snails have survived the assaults of modern chemistry, and they thrive on the benefits of modern engineering-each new irrigation system, each new dam provides more breeding places. Victims pick up the larva in snail-infested paddyfields and irrigated patches where they work, drink and wash clothes. During the occupation of Japan, the U.S. Army drastically reduced the incidence of the disease by killing snails with the chemical sodium pentachlorphenate, but like so many other chemical agents, the stuff also killed fish...
Chemical Attack. But an acceptable anti-snail chemical still seems the most promising solution to the old plague. At field stations in Africa, World Health Organization experts are busy testing dozens of compounds prepared in the laboratories of private industry. After screening 5,000 compounds in search of one that kills snails but leaves other stream life unharmed, Shell Oil researchers in Britain reported that they may finally have discovered the chemical the world has been waiting for. One pound of the stuff per acre of water kills snails within 15 minutes by attacking their respiratory system. According to company...
...compound will undergo extensive WHO tests, and if the new chemical is indeed everything that is claimed, snail eradication can begin in earnest. And none too soon. "Today," warns the British medical journal Lancet, "schistosomiasis threatens to replace malaria as a major scourge of mankind...