Treatment for parasitic worms helps animals survive infectious diseases--and spread them

NSF | JANUARY 12, 2015

Parasitic worms, which infect millions of people and other animals around the world, influence how the immune system responds to diseases like HIV and tuberculosis.

African buffalo. Image: Soerfm/Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 3.0)

In a new study of African buffalo, University of Georgia (UGA) ecologist Vanessa Ezenwa has found that de-worming drastically improves an animal's chances of surviving bovine tuberculosis--but with the consequence of increasing the spread of TB in the population.

Half the buffalo received treatment for helminths; the rest were left untreated as a control group. For the next four years, the scientists recaptured and retested each buffalo approximately once every six months.

They found that animals treated for worms were nine times more likely to survive TB infections than untreated animals; with the worms gone, their immune systems were able to mount a stronger defense against TB.

The improved survival rate allows infected buffalo to continue to spread TB within the herd. Since they still get infected at the same rate there is an unexpected negative result for the population as a whole.

Understanding bovine TB-helminth coinfection in African buffalo is particularly relevant for human health because helminths are known to influence human immune responses to TB.

It's unknown if bovine TB bacteria transmit more efficiently than other TB bacteria, what traits this pathogen possesses that allow infection of so many different species of mammals, and what happens when the host is co-infected with parasites or HIV.

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