Word: wuchereria
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Coconuts & Canoes. Filariasis infects some 190 million people in the tropics. In the Pacific it is contracted from the bite of a mosquito, which deposits microscopic juvenile forms of a nematode, Wuchereria bancrofti, in the skin. In the human victim, the roundworms mature to a length of 1½ in. to 3 in. They live and multiply almost exclusively in lymph nodes, especially the big nodes in the arm pits, groin and scrotum. Their tiny offspring are picked up from a victim's bloodstream by a feeding mosquito-soon to infect another victim...
Called mumu by Samoans, filariasis develops from the worm Wuchereria bancrofti, carried by certain species of mosquitoes. Injected into the blood stream, the baby worm (microfilaria) eventually may grow nearly four inches long. It lodges in the lymph glands, where it reproduces itself. First visible symptoms are painful swellings of an arm, leg or the scrotum. Doctors have been less alarmed than troops by the disease, because even with repeated infections, less than 10% of the cases develop elephantiasis, and symptoms usually disappear after return to a temperate climate. But the disease's monstrous effects on native sufferers...
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