Rosemary Drisdelle Official Homepage

Interesting Things About Disseminated Strongyloidiasis

rosemary — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 12:08:00 +0000

A recent case of disseminated strongyloidiasis, reported by the New England Journal of Medicine highlighted a couple of intriguing features of this catastrophic disease: in the absence of an effective immune response, worms can mature in the lungs as well as the intestine, and, there’s something special about corticosteroid drugs that makes an unfortunate success [...]

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Beauveria bassiana – A Fungus That Kills Bed Bugs

rosemary — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 18:12:28 +0000

Beauveria bassiana is a fungus that is well known for killing insects. Spores of B. bassiana adhere to the cuticle (the outer protective covering) of the insect, begin to grow, and work their way through to the inner tissues. There the fungal growth continues, taking nutrients from the host’s body until the insect dies. Because [...]

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Every Living Thing: A Book Review

rosemary — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 14:08:09 +0000

Every Living Thing: Man’s Obsessive Quest to Catalog Life, from Nanobacteria to New Monkeys by Rob Dunn Harper 2010 ISBN 978-o-06-143031-2 “The biological world does not revolve around us… life is smaller than we imagined, …we are a smaller part of life than we imagined,” and we occupy a “marginal position in the biological universe” [...]

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Was Joshua the Hero Of Jericho? (Schistosoma and Jericho)

rosemary — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 14:14:41 +0000

Reform Judaism Magazine has published an adapted excerpt from my book Parasites: Tales of Humanity’s Most Unwelcome Guests. The excerpt is a shortened version of my retelling of the story of Rahab, Joshua, and the Battle of Jericho, with the blood fluke Schistosoma hematobium as a central character. Reform Judaism Magazine is an interesting publication. [...]

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Echinococcus multilocularis Liver Cysts in Dogs

rosemary — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 15:41:17 +0000

As any good parasitology text will tell you, liver cysts caused by Echinococcus multilocularis typically occur in rodents: animals like voles, lemmings, and mice. The disease is called alveolar echinococcosis, or alveolar hydatid disease, and it occasionally occurs in people too, if eggs of the tapeworm are accidentally swallowed. Echinococcus multilocularis liver cysts in dogs [...]

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Echinococcus multilocularis and Alveolar Echinococcosis

rosemary — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 19:15:08 +0000

The tapeworm Echinococcus multilocularis normally spends its adult life in the intestine of a fox, usually an arctic or red fox. The fox acquires the worm by eating an infected rodent. In turn, the fox passes eggs in its feces, which rodents accidentally eat. In the intermediate host (the rodent or, sometimes, a human) the [...]

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An Epidemic of Absence: A Book Review

rosemary — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 21:43:30 +0000

An Epidemic of Absence: A New Way of Understanding Allergies and Autoimmune Diseases. By Moises Velasquez-Manoff. Scribner; 2012 ISBN 978-1-4391-9938-1 “No matter who we are, we evolved with many more parasites and commensals, both large and small, than we generally encounter today. The implication—and let’s face it, the hope—is that reestablishing contact with some of [...]

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CBC Ideas – Worthy Parasites

rosemary — Wed, 26 Dec 2012 22:31:17 +0000

My CBC Ideas documentary, Worthy Parasites: A Villain’s Silver Lining, will air for the first time on Jan 8, 2013, at 9 PM. Regular listeners of CBCs Ideas, hosted by Paul Kennedy, know that the program can explore virtually any topic in science, history, the arts, culture, religion or anything else you can think of. [...]

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Ivermectin for Bedbugs

rosemary — Wed, 26 Dec 2012 20:34:04 +0000

Would you take a drug to make yourself poisonous to mosquitoes, or black flies, or wasps? How about taking Ivermectin for bedbugs? I’m not so sure about this – the most obvious problem is that one would have to be bitten before it could work! Taking Ivermectin for bed bugs would only work if [...]

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Thoughts on Naegleria fowleri, “brain eating amoeba”

rosemary — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 14:29:08 +0000

Naegleria fowleri: a protist that can be a cyst, an amoeba squelching along, or a whirling swimming flagellate; an organism found all over the world that loves warm water, a free living organism that can adopt a parasitic lifestyle; an organism that will almost certainly kill you if it gets into your brain. Beautiful. Fascinating. [...]

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