![]() ![]() “One sort of creative avenue we're looking at now is reintroduction of snail predators,” Sokolow says. In a new study, researchers at Stanford University discovered that countries that used a creative ecological approach to snail control - such as introducing a predator to the environment-greatly reduced infection rates in those communities. ![]() In the 1970s, the drug praziquantel became an affordable option for combating schistosomiasis around the world, and countries abandoned alternative methods of “snail control” in favor of modern medical treatments.īut today, researchers are starting to rethink a drug-only approach to combating schistosomiasis. And so those eggs can lodge in different tissues and cause severe symptoms ranging from anemia and fatigue, all the way to various severe symptoms, even death in about 10 percent of chronic cases.” And those eggs have sharp barbs because they eventually need to make it back out of the human body and back into the water and find that there are snails that they need to complete their reproduction cycle. It's not the worms that actually cause disease to people, it's the eggs. And they penetrate right through your skin, migrate through your body, end up in your blood vessels where they can live for many years even decades. “You do contract it from just wading, swimming, entering the water in any way, and the parasites basically exit the snails into the water and seek you. “It's one of the world's most deadly parasites,” says Susanne Sokolow, a disease ecologist at Stanford University's Hopkins Marine Station. ![]() But in fact, if we were to point to the animal kingdom’s most frequent killer, it’d actually be the mosquito.Īnother creature belonging to the “small but deadly” category is the freshwater snail, which is responsible for more than 200,000 deaths a year - more deaths than sharks, lions and wolves combined.įreshwater snails carry a parasitic disease called schistosomiasis, which infects nearly 250 million people, mostly in Asia, Africa and South America. As far as the world’s deadliest creatures go, large predators like sharks and lions tend to get all the credit. ![]()
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