Gene/Protein Disease Symptom Drug Enzyme Compound
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Query: UMLS:C0851341 (infestation)
 10,121 document(s) hit in 31,850,051 MEDLINE articles (0.00 seconds)

Of the 512 million inhabitants of sub-Saharan Africa, an estimated 200-250 million are infected with the following intestinal nematodes: Ascaris lumbricoides, Trichuris trichiura, and hookworm. Disease in not more common or evident in this population, however, because most species of worms do not multiply in their hosts and because these worms have a life-span of 1-3 years so worm burdens are acquired gradually over a period of years. Also, disease caused by worms is usually related to worm burden (which has indistinct characteristics) as well as to age and health of the host. Thus, onset of disease can be slow and the diseases tend to be chronic rather than acute. Infestation can be diagnosed easily by microscopic examination of stool which will reveal the prevalence of infection but not the prevalence of disease (heavy infection). Prevalence is affected by age group, and 70% of all worms are present in only 20% of a given community (who are, therefore, the most likely to be diseased from the worms and most likely to transmit disease). With the goal of most control programs being the control of disease rather than of infection, the first task is to identify and treat the heavily-infected people. Since individual identification can be costly, one strategy is to treat everyone or to treat those groups who are most heavily infected. For example, adults in Africa are the most appropriate targets for hookworm treatment, and a large proportion of all disease due to A. lumbricoides and T. trichiura can be eliminated through mass treatment of school children. Removing sources of infection will also remove sources of transmission. It will still be necessary to identify localities where prevalence is above 50% and, thus, call for treatment. Albendazole and mebendazole are effective drugs to treat all species. Levamisole is effective against S. lumbricoides and hookworm, and pyrantel pamoate is effective against A. lumbricoides. The school delivery system for treatment is currently being tested in Ghana and Tanzania and may pave the way to an affordable and sustainable method of controlling parasitic infections.
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PMID:Intestinal worms: strategies to control disease. 1234 51

This paper describes the anthelmintic activity of Zingiber officinale Roscoe (family Zingiberaceae) rhizome, commonly known as ginger, to justify its traditional use in veterinary medicine. Crude powder (CP) and crude aqueous extract (CAE) of dried ginger (1-3 g/kg) were administered to sheep naturally infected with mixed species of gastrointestinal nematodes. Both CP and CAE exhibited a dose- and a time-dependent anthelmintic effect with respective maximum reduction of 25.6% and 66.6% in eggs per gram (EPG) of faeces on day 10 of post-treatment. Levamisole (7.5 mg/kg), a standard anthelmintic agent, exhibited 99.2% reduction in EPG. This study shows that ginger possesses in vivo anthelmintic activity in sheep thus justifying the age-old traditional use of this plant in helminth infestation.
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PMID:In vivo anthelmintic activity of ginger against gastrointestinal nematodes of sheep. 1644 42