By: Alanna Shaikh
Animals and insects play a huge role in the transmission of neglected tropical diseases. From the snails that carry schistosomiasis to the wild animals infected with African sleeping sickness, the NTDs rarely travel alone. That means any effort to control and eliminate NTDs must take into account their many vectors and reservoirs of disease.
The NTDs are not zoonoses. That is, they are not diseases that animals can directly infect humans with. It’s more complicated than that. For example, in the case of human African trypanosomiasis, infected animals are bitten by the tsetse fly, which then carries the parasite to human victims. As long as animals remain infected, there is a risk of human infection.
In the case of schistosomiasis, the parasite that causes the disease has to spend part of its life living in certain kinds of snail. In this case, eradicating the snail would probably eliminate the disease, but doing it isn’t essential. They’re not a reservoir for the parasite, just a stopping point at one time in its revolting little life.[1] The animals reservoirs of schistosomiasis are dogs, cats, rodents, pigs, horses and goats[2], who just get infected with the disease the same way people do.
Be they roundworm, hookworm, nematode, or whipworm, the NTDs have got you totally covered for wormy horror. In possibly the most yucky arrangement of all, many NTDs are causes by actual visible to the eye worms that LIVE INSIDE YOU. I hope my use of all caps conveyed my sheer horror to you. If it didn’t, go take a look at , then come back here and try to pretend you aren’t horrified.