Parasites are very Common;We're All Eating At The Same Table

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Viruses, Bacteria - Parasites

Germs are Everywhere

 

"Germs are everywhere: in air, soil, rocks, and water; in plants and

animals; and, of course, in our own bodies. Some thrive in intense heat,

while others require extreme subzero temperatures. Many have a remarkable

ability to replicate themselves rapidly, reproducing every few hours in

some cases - an evolutionary trick that makes them highly adaptable to

changing environments and to the medicines we use to fight them. Chapter

1: The Immune System's Role in Protection - the Dana Sourcebook of

Immunology)

 

You have all heard that bacteria is good for you. Well, some of it is.

Some live in the stomach and and they help digest the food there. But some

can also make you very, very sick - about 1 in 8 of them are not good for

you. Food poisoning is not good. Neither is contamination. Antrax will

kill you. So will Lyme disease which is transmitted by infected ticks.

 

I'll try not to repeat myself too much, but there are so many I may do so

inadvertently. You can read more about this invasion by parasites - an

invasion which has been around longer than we have - at

http://pnews.org/bio/Parasites.shtml I will reiterate some of what I

said there.

 

As quickly as we develop new methods of defense, ways to destroy the bad

bacteria and the protozoa and other parasites which enter our bodies as

unwelcome guests they do their dirty deed and leave us debilitated and

near death or dead.

 

There are snake-like roundworms "Ascaris lumbriocoides" in the intestines

of about 1.5 billion humans. And in 1.3 billion humans there are

blood-sucking Hookworms. One billion have whipworms." (ibid)

 

How many of you know you have been infected by parasites? How many have

had intestinal parasites? I did once when I went on a gambling junket to

Haiti and drank the water. It was a mean bug which kept me sick for months

and I lost 30 pounds. I thought the medication was killing me, but it may

have been the parasite - and yet, I never got a name for it.

 

Parasites comprise single-celled protozoa but also multicellular animals,

such as nematodes and helminths - which are worms. They need a moist

environment and they very often cause disease in humans. You can get

infected by drinking contaminated water, as I did in Haiti. Actually, it

was the ice. You can be infected by eating infected food or not washing

your hands. One of the most common infections which everyone has heard

about is malaria. My wife's father was in the Pacific in WWII and he came

home with it. It causes recurring fever and chills. They can eventually

kill you.

 

Some of us will have a single-celled trypanosomes if bitten by a tsetse

fly - which drinking your blood as these little creatures entering the

wound where you have been bitten and there it steals oxygen and glucose

and slips into your brain, which and they call that the "sleeping

sickness." The poison to rid a person of them is so potent, that 20% of it

is arsenic and it will melt ordinary plastic IV tubes. When it gets on

your skin it will burn and cause a painful mass of melted swollen flesh.

 

The Onchocerca volvulus, which enters the body from the bite of the black

fly looks liked coiled long snakes thin as threads and travels through

your skin where it often triggers a violent immune response and causes

leopard spot-like rashes on your skin. It is so itchy you may scratch

yourself to death. It causes a disease which is called river blindness. In

some places in Africa every person over forty is blind from this

unfriendly parasite.

 

The Guinea worms are two-foot long creatures which causes blisters on your

legs. The parasite crawls out of the blisters in a few days.

 

And there are filarial worms which which cause a disease you may have

heard mentioned on Dr. House. It is elephatiasis and your scrotum can

swell up so large it can fit in a wheelbarrel. And then there are the

eyeless, mouthless tapeworms, which live in our guts and can grow as long

as 60 feet.

 

The most common and prevalent parasite in the U.S. is what? It is the

Pinworm (Enterobius vermicularis) a/k/a seatworm and threadworm. About

50,000,000 Americans are infected with pinworms. Hundreds of millions are

infected worldwide. Pinworms live in your intestines and they survive by

eating some of the nutrients in your food. Not all of them because that

would not be wise. If you died so would the pinworms or they would have to

find another host so they take what they need but not so much that it

would kill you. The most common symptom of pinworms is an itchy rectum or

vagina. The symptoms are worse at night when the worms are most active and

crawl out of the anus to deposit their eggs. Although pinworm infections

can be very annoying, they are usually not dangerous. These are small

white worms, about a half inch long and females pinworms lay about 15,000

eggs per day. The pinworm scotch tape method of diagnosis is recommended.

Before a bowel movement you would attach tape to the area where irritation

occurs and it would then be removed and looked at under a microscope. It

is not recommended that you do this on your own and I suggest you do not

scratch your ass. When Europeans first came to America the only parasite

found from the study of fossilized feces were pinworms. Other diseases

arrived with the Europeans.

 

The arthropod parasite is a mite (Sarcoptes scabei) causes scabies. It

causes vaginitis in females and urethral disease in males.

 

A parasite which you probably have heard the name mentioned is Toxoplasma

gondii. Sometimes Dr. House will mention a parasite in his diagnosis which

is has been known to change dozens of times in one show. It is one of my

favorite TV shows. The Toxoplasma gondii is a protozoan parasite that

often causes blindness. It will cause severe neurological disease in

newborns. New forms of Gonorrhea bacteria are uneffected by penicillin.

Many can actually absorb antibiotics and seem to thrive on them and

hospitals are breeding grounds for these insideous little creatures. T.

gondii may infect up to 30 percent of the population of the U.S. and they

become very lethal when a patient is given steroids or any

immunosupressive drugs for cancer or to those receiving organ transplants.

Immunologically compromised patients are particularly at risk when they

are infected with Toxoplasma gondii.

 

Giardiasis (Giardia lamblia) causes diarrhea and comes from eating raw or

undercooked food. The diagnosis would be by examining stool samples (in

the lab - not in the home). Coccidia (Cryptosporidium) is a single celled

parasite which also causes diarrhea mostly in your pets but there are a

few species which also affect humans. It does not affect humans. If your

animal is losing weight and has persistent diarrhea, have it checked for

parasites (all of them). If you are losing weight you may want to bottle

the worms and sell them to other obese people. Not really. This infection

is also accompanied by fever, abdominal pain, nausea and vomiting.

 

Hookworm (Necator americanus) is an intestinal parasite which is found

extensively in the tropics and sub-tropical regions. About a billion

people are infected with hookworms.

 

Amebiasis is a disease caused by the parasite entamoeba (Entamoeba

histolytica). This one too is very common in the U.S. by those who were

recently traveled to developing countries where they consumed contaminated

food or water. Most of the people who are contaminated exhibit mild

symptoms of loose stools and stomach pain 1 to 4 weeks after the

infection. Entamoeba dispar is similar but a different species.

 

"Microbes are among the oldest living things on Earth, having existed long

before humans. Geologists have found fossil records of bacteria dating

back 3.5 billion years. What we now know as polio was depicted in Egyptian

stone engravings from 1300 B.C.; the Greek physician Hippocrates described

malaria in the fourth century B.C. The famous Ice Man, the remarkably

well-preserved Ice Age human discovered in northern Italy in 1991, was

found to have the eggs of a type of parasitic roundworm in his

intestines." (Benjamin Reese, Your Immune System A Defense against Hostile

Invaders from the Dana Sourcebook of Immunology)

 

Roundworms (Ascaris sp.) are the most common parasitic infection in the

world, and is primarily it will be found in the tropical and subtropical

regions. But they are rare rare in the US. Most of the infected do not

show any symptoms. Those with symptoms will have some abdominal pain and

weight gain. Occasionally there will be constipation.

 

Tapeworms (Dipylidium caninum) are the most common parasite in dogs and

cats, who swallowing fleas which are infected with tapeworm larvae. The

risk of a tapeworm infection for humans is comparatively low, unless you

too, swallow an infected flea. Hey, I once swallowed a spider.

 

Toxocariasis (Toxocara canis and Toxocara cati) Toxocariasis is a zoonotic

(you get it from animals) disease caused by parasitic worms found in the

intestines of dogs (Toxocara canis) and cats (Toxocara cati). Humans

contract the disease by accidentally ingesting Toxocara eggs, which are

expelled with the animal's stool. That is a revolting thought. BUT,

Toxocariasis may affect the eye when the worm enters the eye and would

result in visual impairment. And it can also result in swelling of organs

accompanied by symptoms which include coughing and a fever.

 

Trichinosis (Trichinella spiralis), an infection by a roundworm, by

ingestion of raw or undercooked meat and predominantly pork. The symptoms

may include abdominal pain and aching muscles and joints.

 

Whipworms (Trichuris trichiura and Trichuris vulpis) are long and

whip-like with over sixty species of whipworms existing. There is a canine

whipworm but also a human whipworm (Trichuris trichiura). Symptoms of

whipworm include abdominal pain, diarrhea and bloody stools (female

whipworms can lay as many as 10,000 eggs a day).

 

Strongyloidosis (Strongyloides stercoralis) are similar to hookworms.

These worms are also able to survive and reproduce in the soil without a

host. People become infected through direct contact with infected soil

containing larvae. The larvae penetrates through the skin, making its way

into the intestine. Most people with strongyloidosis don't know they have

it, though there may be intermittent periods of moderate to severe

abdominal pain, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and constipation. Examination

of stool samples and blood tests are required for a diagnosis. If you

suspect any parasitic infection you need to advise your doctor when you

traveled and your suspicions. These are easy to miss and if you do they

can stay with you for years, if not your entire life. It is no accident

(because of either no symptoms or slight symptoms) that practically

EVERYONE has some parasites and they don't know it.

 

If the Republicans don't get you, the parasites will. They're all coming

back. All those bugs and the viruses and bacteria are being revived. While

we are living longer, we are ill prepared for the coming plagues - and

they're coming. I'm not crying wolf. There is reason to be concerned not

just about global warming, but about the affects these chemicals are

having on the ecosystem and our ability to withstand the all out assault

on your health from pollution which Republicans and Democrats have made

worse chasing profits - and it is too late to say we didn't see it coming.

 

This thing called progress is leading us to extinction. Dams can bring

disease. If you live near a dam or lake when a lake is filled in and it

once held crops there is the potential for schistosomiasis and malaria.

Who gets to weigh these advantages against the risks that are caused by

daming up a former village for cheap hydroelectric power? Who really

benefits? Those who live in the city benefit but those who live in the

shaddow of those dams live with increased risk of disease.

 

Chopping down trees in a rain forest - something as simple as exposing

ground water to sunlight become ideal breeding habitats for Mosquitos

(Anopheles gumbiae) and there has been a resugence of drug resistant

parasites which transmit malaria. When you replace a water buffalo with a

tractor the ideal host for those parasites changes and becomes a human -

which taste a whole lot better than diesel fuel - as is happening in

Thailand with Japanese encephalitis - a virus transmitted by the mosquito

(Culex tritaemorphynchus) - and rice paddies, the breeding grounds. While

this encephalitis also likes hogs, water buffalo was used to plow the rice

paddies while pigs were kept for food and market. The buffalo limited

viral transmission to hogs. It was what they called a "blotter" because

the parasite, C. tritaeniorhynchus perfered buffalo to pork. Replacing the

water buffalo with tractors is progress which caused the mosquitos which

carried the parasites to change their target host to hogs and to humans.

Pigs became infected; more mosquitos become carriers and more humans

became infected. So much for progress.

 

The bird flu - a/k/a avian influenza is a pandemic waiting to happen.

These are viruses which infect birds, primarily poultry - but human cases

have turned up mostly in Asia but the virus is mutating FAST and changing

rapidly enough for a new strain to become emergent which will be able to

jump from human to human with the potential to kill millions of humans.

 

A lot of these deaths could have been prevented. It is like climate

change. We have the warning. We can do something about it. We choose not

to. What do you expect will happen? We humans are not tragic - we're

stupid.

 

Some of them cause a disease called malaria. Some of them will give you a

fever. Some will cause bloody urine. And some of them are quivering

strings of flesh looking worms which spool out of your skin and some put

you to sleep -- (for good).

 

There are leaf-shaped parasitic flukes that live in a person's liver and

blood. If infected, you can accumulate so many you will glitter and your

skin will appear transparent.

 

Life is simple in it's complexity. We talk about being in charge of our

destiny, but some things are just destined; not by supernatural forces,

but by the natural consequences of biological selection for survival and

reproduction. Charles Darwin put it in terms of "modification by

descent", evolving by natural selection of mutations which provide the

best fitness. It seems mindless and in a whole lot of ways it is. It does

not take conscious determination but it does take alteration and mutations

which offer the best chances for adapting to an organism's environment are

the changes which survive - and we don't even have to think about it

because we don't have a conscience choice - anymore than the Dicrocelium

dendriticum in Dennett's Breaking the Spell. That is destiny.

 

Daniel Dennett describes an ant whose brain is "commandeered by a tiny

parasite, a lancet fluke" which is programmed by thousands of years of

evolution to get inside another host in order to reproduce and uses the

ant to do it. The ant, like Sisyphus, keeps climbing to the top of the

grass so it can be eaten by a cow or a sheep. Obviously there is no

benefit to the ant's reproductive success to die by being consumed by cows

or sheep, but it has been driven to do it by the parasite which has

commandeered it's brain. And this happens throughout the animal kingdom

with fish, with mice, with other hosts driven to their death by the

parasitic organism which now inhabits it's body. It even happens to us.

And as Dennett points out it happens to Homo sapiens who are consumed by

their belief in religions, the memes which they are so convinced of, they

are willing to die for and believe they're going to heaven if they do. Or

will have their way with 72 virgins. Islam means "submission" and indeed

that is what it is.

 

There is another world and it lives in us. That world has caused more

death and devastation than all the wars ever fought and will bring down on

us the next plague. It is the world of viruses, bacteria, protozoa and

lancet flukes.

 

Bacteria of composed of loose DNA and loosely assembled proteins, whereas

protozoa are multicellular and more like us with their DNA intact.

Microbial infectious parasites are everywhere.

 

"Modern medical science has increasingly implicated microbes in coronary

artery disease, diabetes, autism, multiple sclerosis, chronic lung

disease, and certain types of cancer. In fact, microbial infections

account for more deaths worldwide than any other single cause, and the

cost to treat them exceeds $120 billion a year in the United States

alone." (Benjamin Reese, Your Immune System - A Defense against Hostile

Invaders from the Dana Sourcebook of Immunology)

 

Ticks are insects commonly found in wooded areas. Some species carry the

bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi, which causes Lyme disease. Like

mosquitoes, they feed on the blood of other animals, but unlike

mosquitoes, they hook into the animal's skin for extended periods of time.

(CDC)

 

Plasmodium, the parasite which causes malaria is a protozoan and there are

multiple species which get into humans when musquitos (spanish for "little

flies") vampirishly suck human blood. Tsetse flies dose their human

victims with the sleeping sickness. In Europe and the Americas bacteria

and viruses have caused tuberculosis and polio. Protozoa hang out mostly

in the tropics and poor people suffer the most from parasites. During the

period of colonization a whole new field of medicine sprang up to study

these diseases, which was called tropical medicine.

 

According to Laurie Garrett in The Coming Plague (1994), in the second

year of WWII, penicillin was dispersed to ARmy doctors to use for malaria

and even in the small dose which was used then it was highly successful.

Army doctors, she says, were so impressed with it that they "collected the

urine of patients who were on the drug and crystallized excreted

penicillin for reuse on other GIs." That small dose in 1993 would have

been in inadequate and today the plasmodium parasite has evolved a

resistance to penicillin.

 

Carl Zimmer writes in Parasite, Inside the Bizarre World of Nature's Most

Dangerous Creatures (2001): "Europeans came to look upon parasites as

robbing them of native labor, of slowing down the building of their canals

and dams, of preventing the white race from living happily at the Equator.

When Napoleon took his army to Egypt, the soldiers began to complain that

they were menstruating like women. Actually they had been infected with

flukes..."

 

These flukes lived in snails and attracted to humans they would infect

their victims by attaching themselves to their legs and feet in the lakes

and ocean and enter their veins and stomachs, finding their way to the

bladder where they lay their eggs. Those infected would urinate blood.

 

"Blood flukes attacked people from the western shores of Africa to the

rivers of Japan; the slave trade even brought them to the New World, where

they thrived in Brazil and the Caribbean. The disease they caused, known

as bilharzia or schistosomiasis (mentioned a few times on Dr. House),

drained the energy of hundreds of millions of people who were supposed to

build European empires." (Zimmer)

 

Vaccines were not successful and other meds did little good. The better

method to control them was not to encourage their habitation at all, to

kill the cause rather than treat the symptoms.

 

Burma has been in the news lately for it's political unrest, but not so

much is reported about the debilitating parasite causing diseases and

death where 75% of those seeking medical health care each year in that

country alone was because of malaria and other parasites - where the

mosquito became resistant to DDT and other insecticides. And other high

death and disease causing parasitic diseases break out, such as the

filariasis, cholera and dengue hemorrhagic fever, killing thousands

throughout the region.

 

And these parasitic disease are not all class based infections. Many of

them attack everyone. As pointed out by Robert Desowitz in New Guinea

Tapeworms and Jewish Grandmothers, Toxoplasma gondii (a protozoan parasite

that can cause blindness and severe neurological disease in the newborn)

infect citizens without regard to race, creed or economic class."

 

Parasites are becoming increasingly prevalent and problematic because they

are the result of human exploitation of resources and land, building dams,

destruction of rain forests, and what feels like progress, but turns out

to be very harmful in the long run. Life can't be happier if you are dead.

 

We are in a _middle_ world and we are just discovering there is another

world out here; a very small world. The big world is also mysterious to

us; it is the world of the universe which is so huge we have difficulty

wrapping our minds around concepts like dark matter and dark energy - and

we really don't know what it is and it may have it's own natural laws.

 

And in the middle and small worlds anything which contains DNA has the

tools therein to replicate itself using a blueprint of some of genetic

code and some of it is essentially the same for every living thing on the

planet - or else it did not originate here on the planet - and the

earliest life did not in fact originate on this planet. The first life,

our ancestors, arrived here from somewhere out there in the universe, in

the bigger world.

 

But much closer to us in genetic similarity are not the single celled

molecular extremeophiles which started it all; they are the creatures

which evolved to live in us and every species on the planet. They

outnumber other species about four to one and some parasites even have

their own parasites. They are the majority of the species on this planet.

 

They live in other animals and in us with ease. Many of them change our

personalities, manage our immune systems, reproduce inside of us, and

sometimes they kill us, and coexist with us. Some of them castrate us and

some take over our minds.

 

Everything living has some parasites living inside of them. That is a

world you may be barely aware of but it is there and it is killing us. As

you get older chances are you will acquire more and more of these

creatures which are often there for more than just the ride.

 

As we learn more about parasites we're finding out they may be the

dominant force in evolution. We evolve defenses against them, but they

seem to be winning.

 

Those who caution against dire predictions of doom and gloom ignore the

reality which does demand not only our awareness, but action to prevent

it. Climate change is a procursor to more disease and so is the evolving

resistance of microbial infectious agents to antibiotics. So is the

evolution of new infections, new parasites in this battle for life on the

planet - which they are winning. There has already been five major

extinctions and there are scientists who tell us we're in the sixth

extinction level now. Sure, some will say the planet can survive this, but

what about humanity? It is with high probability that we will not survive

the onslaught and will lose this war to emerging diseases.

 

"Your body's first line of defense against any hostile invader is

something you probably take for granted: your skin, the body's largest

organ. Among other health-related duties, the skin protects against

biological predators in several ways. Skin has three layers, providing a

formidable physical barrier to bugs. Sweat, oils, and other skin

secretions help neutralize and wash away invaders. And our skin is

populated by harmless bacteria that consume nutrients that would otherwise

feed enemy invaders." (Benjamin Reese, Your Immune System - A Defense

against Hostile Invaders from the Dana Sourcebook of Immunology)

 

"But the barrier that skin provides isn't foolproof: the eyes, nose, and

mouth all provide openings where invaders can sneak in. For this reason,

your body has a second set of biological barriers, located in the mucous

membranes that line these openings. Every time you blink your eyes, for

example, your eyelids wash away microbes much the way windshield wipers

sweep away debris. Inhale something that your body knows doesn't belong,

like pollen, and you'll sneeze the invader out. Saliva and tears both

contain the enzyme lysozyme, which destroys bacteria. Any harmful bacteria

that somehow manage to sneak down your throat plunge into a deadly acid

bath in your stomach." (ibid)

 

"Unfortunately, wily bugs are sometimes able to breach these multiple

barriers......." (ibid)

 

They really are smart and they inhabit OUR world, which is in us. It makes you

wonder: do we inhabit another living world ALSO? What if the universe is really

ONE BIG LIVING ORGANISM and we're just like those parasites -- ALL OF US eating

at the same table?

 

Hank Roth

http://pnews.org/< http://pnews.org/>

 

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