BACKGROUND Onchocerciasis (river blindness) is a parasitic disease transmitted by blackflies. Symptoms include severe itching, skin lesions, and vision impairment including blindness. More than 99% of all cases are concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa. Fortunately, vector control and community-directed treatment with ivermectin have significantly decreased morbidity, and the treatment goal is shi...

IN 1978, when I was a Fellow in Ophthalmology at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, I went to a seminar given by one of the senior faculty (Maurice Langham) about work he was doing on an unusual disease called onchocerciasis. Although I must have learnt about onchocerciasis at medical school and during my ophthalmology training, it was such an esoteric tropical disease in small print that...

Human Onchocerciasis, caused by infection the filarial nematode Onchocerca volvulus , is a neglected public health disease that affects millions of people in endemic regions sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. It also called river blindness because Blackflies transmit breeds rapidly flowing fresh water streams rivers. This review features state-of-the-art data on parasite, its endobacteria Wo...

DING WANG,∗†† XIANFENG ZHANG,∗ KEXIONG WANG,∗ ZHUO WEI,∗ BERND WÜRSIG,† GILLIAN T. BRAULIK,‡ AND SUSIE ELLIS§ ∗Institute of Hydrobiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan 430072, China †Texas A&M University, 4700 Avenue U, Building 303, Galveston, TX 77551, U.S.A. ‡Downstream Research Group, 3950 S. Fletcher Avenue, Amelia Island, FL 32034, U.S.A. §Conservation International, 1919 M Street, S...

In Australia, Ross River virus (RRV) is predominantly identified and managed through passive health surveillance. Here, the proactive use of environmental datasets to improve community-scale public health interventions in southeastern Tasmania is explored. Known environmental drivers (temperature, rainfall, tide) of the RRV vector Aedes camptorhynchus are analysed against cumulative case record...

Abdon Atangana 1,*,† and Rubayyi T. Alqahtani 2,† 1 Institute for Groundwater Studies, University of the Free State, Bloemfontein 9301, South Africa 2 Department of Mathematics and Statistics, College of Science, Al-Imam Mohammad Ibn Saud Islamic University (IMSIU), Riyadh 11566, Saudi Arabia; [email protected] * Correspondence: [email protected]; Tel.: +27-78-294-8604; Fax: +27-51-...

Onchocerciasis (river blindness) is caused by the parasitic worm Onchocerca volvulus, which is transmitted by Simulium species black flies that breed in fast-flowing rivers and streams. In the human host, adult male and female O. volvulus worms become encapsulated in subcutaneous fibrous “nodules” and fertilized females produce embryonic microfilariae (mf) that migrate to the skin, where they a...