Parasites Are Everywhere. Why Do So Few Researchers Study Them?

The book Parasite Rex (2001) by Carl Zimmer is fantastic, and it inspired quite a few researchers to go into the study of parasites: https://www.amazon.com/Parasite-Rex-Bizarre-Dangerous-Creatu...

The book manages to be gross and fascinating and occasionally beautiful.

Given the age, I'm sure some of the science is outdated, perhaps even by people who grew up reading the book. But it remains one of my favorites, and it's an accessible read. If not always a comfortable one!

I remember listening to the radio (I believe on cbc canada), and one issue of studying any living thing is, whether your animal/creature of choice is in vogue currently or not. People below have mentioned funding which ties into that, but, if you're studying birds it's a lot easier to publish, there's more of an ecosystem and conferences, etc... than if you were to study some insect that nobody has heard of. Even within existing conferences you might not get "top-billing", even if you're presenting.

Pity as the things nobody has ever heard of are probably the most interesting.

I wish I remembered more details so could link something.

This is an excellent book for anyone that finds this subject interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasite_Rex

Well, researchers mostly use the subjects which are available which tends to be broke college students, studying corporate executives is more difficult.

> Parasitism is far from easy living; hundreds of millions of years of evolution have prodded parasites to find and manipulate other animals, just as those animals have evolved their own unique methods of survival.

Parasites manipulating their hosts is something that really fascinates me from an evolutionary point of view. An example given in the article is T. gondii [0]:

> [...] a parasitic protozoan that boasts “Mind Control,” because it attracts its rodent host to the smell of cat urine, where the rat spreads the parasite to felines.

Infected mice also have a reduced fear from predators, likely for the same reason.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasma_gondii

FTA:

>Why do so few researchers study them?

>In the fall of 1985, Scott L. Gardner found himself standing over his toilet bowl, fishing around in the squishy output of his empty bowels with a chopstick.

fsckboy's law of headlines: If the headline asks a question, check if the first sentence has your answer

>...Gardner was prescribed an antiparasitic pill, and the next morning, he pooped out his intestines’ inhabitant—all 12 inches of it.

irl, my brother got a parasite once, a tapeworm. This was all without leaving an upscale suburb of Boston. Only "noticed" it when he, a well-built vigorous athlete, lost a lot of weight out of the blue. It was eating his lunch, so to speak.

I recommend the funny and gross book, "New Guinea Tapeworms and Jewish Grandmothers: Tales of Parasites and People" by Robert S. Desowitz. Basically a bunch of horrible parasite diseases, some with a bit of detective story to figure out.

TWiP: This Week in Parasitism A podcast about the tiny creatures that live on and inside us. New episodes the 1st and 3rd Friday of each month.

https://www.microbe.tv/twip

If you're ever in Tokyo, the Meguro Parasitological Museum is genuinely worth a visit although maybe don't go straight out for sushi afterwards as we did.

Pictures of parasites: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/meguro-parasitological-m...

Perhaps because we have probably already discovered pretty much every parasite that infects humans, at least those with widespread impact in the western world?

Parasites tend to be multicellular and relatively large (you can see them all with an optical microscope), and therefore hard to miss.

On the other hand, there are plenty of bacteria and viruses that are out there still to be discovered, many of which directly impact humans.

I've often thought that the economics profession could do with more cross pollination with biology. Modeling the economy as a living ecosystem with, for example, a network of parasites and symbiotes would be more illuminating than the default neoclassical mode that almost treats it like a sanitized gaseous system where you turn a dial labeled "interest rates".

I'm pretty sure there's a lot of conceptual overlap between parasitic/symbiotic organisms and economic relationships, too. E.g. I'm pretty sure this kind of thing happens all the time in scamming ecosystems:

>Often, in an effort to travel between host animals, parasites will expose their hosts to new predators, like the tapeworm Ligula intestinalis, which grows so large it changes the buoyancy of the fish it inhabits, causing the fish to swim closer to the surface and get eaten by birds.

Someone did a book like the Secret Life of Trees but just for Oaks. There are a thousand critters and microbes adapted to oak habitation and/or parasitizing.

The tannins in oak are an arms race to slow many of them down. As is the thick epidermis on mature leaves. And then there are the adaptations to prioritize roots over leaves when young, which both helps them tap into the wood wide web but also I suspect helps them deal with deer. Stay small until you can get tall and then jump out of reach as fast as you can.

I immediately Ctrl-F'd for 'funding'. There's your problem right there. If there's no money to support graduate students, you're never going to get enough researchers to replace the ones you have.

Additionally, graduate students tend to avoid selecting research areas they dislike or find disgusting. The most disturbing presentation I've ever watched was a slideshow given by a parasitologist in which I saw worms in parts of the human body I never imagined it possible for worms to be in. No wonder students aren't lining up to spend years of their life working with them.

There's not much profit in treating parasites, and profit funds research. Like bacterial infection (before the rise of resistant bugs), you treat a parasite with a few doses and you're done. No more disease means no more revenue. So unless a really large fraction of the high income world gets a parasite, or the parasitism is chronically incurable, there's too little financial reward to justify studying or treating it.

We can acknowledge the effects on rat sexual arousal, but to extend this research into human behavior is just asking to get your funding cut and be excommunicated.

https://www.nature.com/articles/nrmicro1687

If parasites were widespread amongst human beings, would those infected humans have incentive to study them?

We are likely biased and can't imagine how we are biased because of the infection! Yet the over-under for an individual is clear: try the medication and find out!

Generally research follows funding, not intellectual curiousity. So the single-celled eukaryotic malaria parasite is pretty well-studied. This also highlights the often arbitrary nature of division of labor in academics - all viruses and many eubacteria could reasonably be classified as parasites, but are instead handed off to virology and infectious microbiology (which tends to exclude parasitic eukaryota, even single-celled protists, from its domain).

Out in nature, things get more complicated - there are many reports of viruses infecting parasites which in turn infect animals, for example.

https://schaechter.asmblog.org/schaechter/2011/07/viruses-th...

The tradition in parasitology of self-experimentation -- swallowing unknown larvae to see what they do to your body -- perhaps might deter new recruits from entering the field.

In my (hobby) field of artificial life and program generation, there is a lot of research into the energy dynamics of parasitism.

Isn’t there a lot of parasitic research at DARPA facilities, for example Lyme disease and Rocky Mountain spotted fever?

This should be some interesting discussion since parasites are kind of the hackers of the biological world.

because they're oh so disturbing

the same reason why so many other disturbing things go unstudied

like certain risks to our survival, for example

i think it's a vuln humans have

>Why do so few researchers study them?

Because they're the ones funding medical research! nyuk nyuk!

Seriously though, as a health nut who tries to stay on the science side of things, I still see a lot of "It's Parasites!" stuff from the pseudo-science health community. As well as bizarre cures. Walnuts, Cloves and electric shock seem to come up the most.

I have tried to find any practical advice regarding detection, symptoms and such, and beyond tapeworms, heartworms and hookworms, there isn't much information.

The amount of grants that you receive in modern zoology is directly proportional to the sweetness in your discourse, the size of the eyes and the density of the fur in your subject

> Housed in a few modest rooms adjacent to a botanical collection and the floor’s only bathroom, the laboratory is the world’s largest university collection of parasites.

> the Manter Lab only receives enough funding to employ the two men

This explains why perfectly. Researchers that choose this live basically in poverty, so why would you to encourage your son to follow that career?.

This and the two billions of videos of cats on internet that everybody consumes actively all the time. Try to earn sympathy and views with a samba dancing flatworm compilation instead. It only works one or none times.