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Inflammatory, Hypersensitivity and Immune Lung Diseases, including Parasitic Diseases.
Published in Fred W Wright, Radiology of the Chest and Related Conditions, 2022
Guinea worm (Dracunculus medinensis) infestation, found in Pakistan, Africa, etc., is contracted through drinking unstrained water containing larvae, within small fresh-water crustacean cyclops. The adult worms may become calcified in the soft tissues of the chest wall, abdomen, pelvis and limbs. The male worms are small, and the females much larger (7.5 to 12 cm long) superficially resembling earthworms. In the chest wall and abdomen, the calcified worms tend to be convoluted, sometimes with surrounding dystrophic calcification, whereas in the lower limbs the calcified worms tend to be more extended - see Illus. GUINEA WORMS.
An Overview of Helminthiasis
Published in Venkatesan Jayaprakash, Daniele Castagnolo, Yusuf Özkay, Medicinal Chemistry of Neglected and Tropical Diseases, 2019
Leyla Yurttaș, Betül Kaya Çavușoğlu, Derya Osmaniye, Ulviye Acar Çevik
Dracunculus medinensis is a nematode that causes drancunculosis, a parasitic dermatosis that has affected humans for centuries. Dracunculus medinensis known as “Guinea worm” has been reported in 17 African countries including Yemen, Saudi Arabia, India and Pakistan. The disease remains asymptomatic till completion of puberty and fertilisation of female larvea during incubation period. Systemic infections may cause cutaneous manifestations as well as diarrhea, nausea, dyspnea, syncope and vomiting. The diagnosis of drancunculosis can be favored by worm extrusion from a skin lesion or wet smears showing motile larvae on microscopy (Linquist and Cross 2017, Assimwe and Hengge 2017).
Engineering and infectious disease
Published in Sandy Cairncross, Richard Feachem, Environmental Health Engineering in the Tropics, 2018
Sandy Cairncross, Richard Feachem
Another water-based disease is Guinea worm (Dracunculus medinensis, Figure 1.4), which has a unique transmission route. The mature female worm releases hundreds of thousands of microscopic larvae from a painful blister, usually on the leg of the human host. If, when the blister bursts, these are washed into a pond or shallow well, they are eaten by tiny crustaceans called cyclopoids, which then become infected. Cyclopoids are only 0.8 mm long and so are easily consumed inadvertently in water from an infected pond or well. Any Dracunculus worms they contain will develop further in the human host and any fertilised female worm will make her way to the legs and form a new blister a year later, ready to start a new cycle.
History of schistosomiasis (bilharziasis) in humans: from Egyptian medical papyri to molecular biology on mummies
Published in Pathogens and Global Health, 2018
Stefano Di Bella, Niccolò Riccardi, Daniele Roberto Giacobbe, Roberto Luzzati
Eventually, sixty-four years after the discovery of Bilharz, Robert Thomson Leiper understood the complete cycle of Schistosoma spp., with the recognition of aquatic snails as intermediate hosts of these trematodes. Leiper was a Scottish physician later on named the ‘Father of modern helminthology’; apart from schistosomiasis, he made other considerable discoveries on life cycles and mode of transmission of other helminths, namely Dracunculus medinensis and Loa loa. In 1915, when he was a member of the Royal Army Medical Corps, he also distinguished between S. mansoni and S. haematobium by their morphology, egg type, and snail host [17].