• Question: what is the easyist parasite to handle

    Asked by leo to Claire, Franco, Koi, Linda, Mark on 20 Jun 2016.
    • Photo: Franco Falcone

      Franco Falcone answered on 20 Jun 2016:

      @Leo Interesting question, I don’t know, as I’ve only handled a few. Ascaris suum is pretty easy to handle as long as you have access to pigs in a slaughterhouse, as you can literally get buckets full of them…

    • Photo: Linda Anagu

      Linda Anagu answered on 20 Jun 2016:

      @Leo, I certainly do not know. blood stage malaria parasites in the laboratory are babies, you need to feed them every 48 hrs with blood.

    • Photo: Claire Bourke

      Claire Bourke answered on 20 Jun 2016:

      @Leo,
      All I know is how to handle the parasites that I have worked with before. I used to care for lots of schistosome worms and actually this was quite a challenge! They have a complicated life cycle which involves snails and mammals, so I had to look after not 1, but 3 different species just to keep them going! The snails needed to be fed 3 times a week with lettuce and I need to wash all of their tanks, the mice that we used as the mammalian hosts needed lots of care and attention to ensure that they didn’t get too sick and the free-living larval stage of the schistosome, called cercariae, are highly infectious so I needed to use lots of special techniques to avoid becoming infected myself. Even infecting the snails was a challenge because I had to carefully hatch schistosome eggs then catch individual fast swimming snail-infective larvae 1-by-1 under a microscope…phew, lots of work!

      At the time I was working with the schistosome species called Schistosoma mansoni, but I know that another species of the same parasite called Schistosoma haematobium is even harder to look after in the lab, so S. mansoni isn’t the hardest, but definitely doesn’t sound like the easiest either!

    • Photo: Mark Booth

      Mark Booth answered on 20 Jun 2016:

      Hi Leo

      If you mean handling in terms of manipulating them in a laboratory setting then I refer you to the answers below. If you are thinking about tolerating a parasitic infection then I would say that a small number of gut worms is fairly easy to tolerate if you are otherwise metabolically and physically OK. Many people have pinworms and don’t even know they have got them, for example. An adult tapeworm is also easy to handle internally but the proglottids that contain eggs can be shed at any time, leading to some potential embarassment

    • Photo: Arporn Wangwiwatsin

      Arporn Wangwiwatsin answered on 20 Jun 2016:

      Hi Leo,

      I haven’t handled so many parasites but I find adult Schistosoma mansoni worms not too bad to handle… they need to be fed with nutrient-rich media a couple of time each week and they don’t die easily. But for the younger stages of this parasites, oh dear, yes lots of work and care required as Claire mentioned!

      (Hmmm I want to see a bucket full of Ascaris suum roundworms 😮 😮 )

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