Research
Water-mediated diseases
Insects that have an aquatic life stage cause the spread of many infectious and emerging diseases of humans. Diseases with such insect vectors, especially mosquitoes, include malaria, dengue fever, yellow fever, and lymphatic filariasis. Other water borne diseases include schistosomiasis (or bilharzia), for which the human parasite lives in aquatic snails in an earlier part of the life cycle. These diseases cause immeasurable suffering around the world. One quarter of Haiti’s population, for example, is infected with lymphatic filariasis (also know as elephantitis), which causes disfiguring, swelling, and often death from secondary infection. CAC researchers are exploring potential collaboration in efforts led by Tom Streit, Director of Notre Dame’s Haiti Program (http://haiti.nd.edu), in collaboration with the Haitan government and other partners to eradicate lymphatic filariasis from Haiti, using salt fortified with appropriate drugs.
In Kenya, CAC researcher David Lodge has collaborated in efforts to reduce schistosomiasis in a region where 70% of the children in some schools are infected. Efforts to use an introduced predator of the vector snails—the Louisiana crayfish--are currently stalled however because of insufficient analysis of the environmental impacts on other freshwater resources of such a control strategy. Additional work is urgently needed to devise disease control strategies that appropriately balance the competing goals of protecting the aquatic ecosystems that provide many resources to people with the short-term reduction in disease. A related project in China, where schistosomiasis is also a serious and growing problem, is under discussion.
CAC researchers are also collaborating with Notre Dame’s leading researchers on malaria and other vector-borne diseases, including researchers associated with Notre Dame’s Center for Tropical Disease Research and Training (http://www.nd.edu/~ctdrt), where better understanding of the aquatic life phase of the mosquito vectors are important to disease control.
