Week 5: What’s so fun about filariasis? Or: I have yet to meet a vector that I like!

It has been awhile since I took my turn at the wheel of the blog so this is really a combination of weeks 4 and 5. . Finally, some things that you can get, if you want, which you probably don’t, but if you did, it wouldn’t be quite as awful as some of the others previously mentioned, that you really don’t want to get!  Highlights: various filarial infections, occasionally referred to as hilarious filarial infections, but they are really not that funny, more like amusing. Loa Loa for example (sung to the tune of Louie Louie by the Kingsmen) will just annoy you for twenty years with an occasional worm crawling across your eye and won’t kill you unless you happen to be treated for another infection, also caused by filarial worms. I will spare you the details about treatment (mainly because I haven’t really mastered the details) but we were shown an amazing self-video by one of our lecturers (a gorilla researcher, or more accurately, a person who does research on gorillas) of an adult loa loa crossing his lower eyelid. Creepy but nothing compared to plague!  Just when you thought it might be safe to enter the jungle, however, we run smack into sleeping sickness, Chagas, espundia, and Kala Azar. These are a couple of ugly customers if I ever saw one and are now tied for first.  The diseases are miserable and eventually fatal, but at least the treatment is highly toxic, miserable and potentially fatal too. And what about the vectors? Horseflies, blackflies, tsetse flies, sandflies, and worst of all, the triatomine bugs (big, buggy, stealthy, and numerous!).  Makes me itch just to think about it.

reduvid bug - aka kissing bug, assassin bug 

The real highlight was the visit of Jinny and Steve. Laurel has already filled y'all in on most of this but would add that Jinny and I went to the opera. Beautiful music and singing told the story of Edward Onegin, youngish, somber Russian aristocrat with a poor sense of humor, an overdeveloped sense of honor, and unfortunately good aim, who spurns love, humiliates then kills his friend in a duel, wanders aimlessly, is spurned by love, then declares in song, somewhat obviously I thought, that he is destined for nothing but anguish. 

It was a great way to celebrate Jinny’s birthday (someone other than me will have to blog which birthday) and ever since I have not been able to stop humming: “always look on the bright side of life…..

 

Finally, I would be remiss not to mention our trip to Parliament where we learned the origin of  “towing the line” (two real lines on the floor of the house of commons which kept opposing parties just over two sword lengths apart) and lobbying (MPs are obligated to grant their constituents an audience which takes place, where else, but in the lobby of Parliament).  We also learned that there were at least 17 pubs or bars in Parliament but these, sadly, were not included in our tour.