This post is inspired by my girlfriend, who just took a class called Parasites and Pestilence (I think Martell took it also?). This week she was studying for her final and wouldn't stop talking my ear off about the lifecycles of a variety of parasites, including those that cause the disease Schistosomiasis.
We heard a little about Schisto from our travel health clinic visitors, but as a quick recap, it is a disease that utilizes two hosts, freshwater snails and humans, to complete its life cycle. A human gets infected when they are exposed to freshwater where the free-swimming larva can penetrate the skin. The larva grow inside the human and lays eggs that are released in urine or stool, which then often makes its way back to freshwater sources, where the eggs can hatch in snails and complete the life cycle. Here's a picture to explain it a little better:
I thought that this might be sometime worth thinking about since we will be interacting with quite a bit of freshwater, and in a little searching around online I came across an interesting little article about how the Manso dam increases the possibility of introduction of schistosomes, and thus provided the impetus for a study on the susceptibility of the local snail populations to becoming hosts for this disease. Luckily the study found that there was a relatively low level of susceptibility, but did not discount the fact that this could still be a potential problem in the area of the Pantanal.
Source: http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?pid=S0074-02762006000900036&script=sci_arttext&tlng=es
Cole
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