Bilharzia : History of Shistosomiasis in humans and causes
Snail fever or Bilharzia is as old as history , signs of it have been found in the bodies of men from many past centuries , But only within recent years has man learned its cause .
Ways of curing it are still imperfect , and , far from being under control , the disease already threatens 150-200 million people and is steadily spreading .
Snail fever is a disease of childhood that remains through old age , not often killing by itsself but weakening the people who contact it and making it easy for them to get other illness .
In its early stages , it is marked by fever , too much loose body waste , stomach pain , and later by the destruction of the intestines and hardening of the liver .
This old and ugly disease is caused by small flat worms that live in the human body , feeding on blood , their presence was first discovered in 1851 by Theodor Bilharz , who found the full-grown worms in the human body .
The adult females , which measure three-eighths of an inch long , lay eggs in the blood of the stomach and intestine .
Some of these eggs leave the blood to go to the liver and walls of the intestines where a hard outside coat forms around the eggs.
The collection of these eggs over a period of time causes the intestines to weaken , the victim passes blood and later the liver harden .
All this , and more , the scientists learned .
They found that the worms lay eggs within the bloodstream and that the seriousness of the disease depends on the number of eggs .
They learned too that the egg do not develop within the body , but it took some sixty years of study before the scientists found out how the worms passes from one person to another .
Egs are given off with the body waste when the eggs get into the water , they break ,freeing an undeveloped worm which will swim for about sixteen hours and then die .
The scientists thought that there must be develop worm lives .
When a scientist studying snail in the Nile River found an undeveloped worm in the body of a snail , the true answer was found .
Now it is known that if the undeveloped worm finds a snail in the water , it enters it body .
Within a month , it reproduces thousands of tiny worms , when these tiny worms are given off by the snail , they swim for as much as three days looking for a human body to enter .
They can get into someone bathing , washing , swimming , fishing , working in rice field , performing any of the activities that take people in pool of slow moving streams .
These tiny worms dig through the skin of their victims , enter the blood stream and flow throuh the body.
In time they develop into adult worms , able to lay eggs which will reproduce on being passed from the human .
On reaching water , they will set free undeveloped worms which enter the bodies of the snails , thus starting again the round of man to snail to man .
Exactly when the snails that carry bilharzia and their worms came to the Americas is not known ,
Most Doctors think they probably arrived with the African slaves brought to Brazil to work in the wet fields of the coast .
The slave ships had few comfort for their passengers but the one thing they could not do without was water .
If they allowed too little water , then the valuable slaves arrived dead .
So , water was brought from the slow moving stream of the African coast and in it the snails crossed the Atlantic , when the old water was emptied into the streams of Brazil , the New World received another problem from the old .
It grows steadily more serious as man remakes his surrounding in ways which help the snails .
Places which hold back flowing water , and farms with rice fields are bad.
Poorly planned water systems in warm lands allow places where snails can grow in great numbers .
In Brazil , authorities consider snail fever , or bilharzia , their greatest health problem .
More than four million people are already infected .
What is more , the disease appears each year in new districts , carried , and it is believed , by people from the dry north-east .
Snail fever can be cured , when treated early , four out of five cases yield to the new medicines , but these often produce other bad effect in the patient and sometimes kill the patient instead of the worm.
The most promising line of attack appears to be against the snails .
With mankind behind in the race with the snail , health workers tried to kill the snails in pool by running electricity through the water , with no success .
Others brought different kinds of snails from Puerto Rico , which were supposed to eat their worm-carrying cousins , but didn't work either .
In 1950 , the world health organization made it possible for a team of Brazilian and American scientist to work on new poisons against the snails.
The results are still uncertain
As things now stands , getting rid of the snails does not appear probably in the near future.
Whether large-scale spraying programmes to control the snail are worth their cost is a question .
Authorities in Washington favour the idea of spraying ; those in Rio de Janeiro have their doubts .
The health center in a small town in Brazil was located in a small house on a dusty road .
The walls had holes in them and the roof let in the rain .
'our greatest problem is lack of money' , remarked the doctor sorrowfully .
Forty patients and three pretty nurses dressed in white were crowded into a tiny waiting room .
Most of the patients had come on foot from great distances to be examined or treated for snail fever .
one old man was from a town 170 miles away ; he had ridden on top of a truck to see if the people at the health center could cure him 'as you did to the woman next door' he could not remember having been in a pool of water or stream during the past thirty years.
He thought he might have picked up the disease forty years ago while building bridges .
His case was so bad that little could be done for him , he kept saying , ' but you cured the woman next door ' .
From the waiting room , i went into the office where the young doctor of the health center seated behind his old desk asking questions .
The patient was a woman about to have a baby , she sat leaning on the desk with her head resting on her weak hands and answered the doctor's question in a low , tired voice.
She was twenty eight , she was married and she had nine children living .
Further questioning showed that she had all the usual signs of snail fever : such as fever , loose body waste , and stomach pain.
She also went inside the water often to wash clothes as did all the women suffered from the disease .
There were no latrines in the village.
The doctor gave her a talk on how the disease moves from person to snail and back to person , he told that since here was an early case , it could probably be cured but that the medicine was powerful and taking it was dangerous .
'That is nothing' , she said 'i am quite an old woman and i do not have fear of sickness or of medicine , But i do not want my baby to have this thing , will my baby have the disease ?
Yes , if you are not cured of it , but i think we will have you well before the baby is born .
But will i get the disease again when i do the washing ?
' if you into the pond , you probably will '
Where else can one wash ?
' talk to the people of your village about building a public washing place , in the meantime , you should take your clothes to the nearest village that has a public place .
' Yes , doctor' , she said , sounding tired again . ' but we a poor village ' .
' None of the villages is rich ' said the doctor . ' some have people who value their children's health more than others ' .
How can i get the people in my village to build a public washing place ?
'Talk to the nurses on the way out , they will tell you how to do it .
Here , i thought as i listened , is something of importance to a nation , to the whole world .
A people organizing themselves , in spite of being so poor , and trying to stop disease , rather than depending on outside help .
If only more people in the world would do this , there will be much less illness.
 |
| Photo Credit : Yourgenom |
Ways of curing it are still imperfect , and , far from being under control , the disease already threatens 150-200 million people and is steadily spreading .
Snail fever is a disease of childhood that remains through old age , not often killing by itsself but weakening the people who contact it and making it easy for them to get other illness .
In its early stages , it is marked by fever , too much loose body waste , stomach pain , and later by the destruction of the intestines and hardening of the liver .
This old and ugly disease is caused by small flat worms that live in the human body , feeding on blood , their presence was first discovered in 1851 by Theodor Bilharz , who found the full-grown worms in the human body .
The adult females , which measure three-eighths of an inch long , lay eggs in the blood of the stomach and intestine .
Some of these eggs leave the blood to go to the liver and walls of the intestines where a hard outside coat forms around the eggs.
The collection of these eggs over a period of time causes the intestines to weaken , the victim passes blood and later the liver harden .
All this , and more , the scientists learned .
They found that the worms lay eggs within the bloodstream and that the seriousness of the disease depends on the number of eggs .
They learned too that the egg do not develop within the body , but it took some sixty years of study before the scientists found out how the worms passes from one person to another .
Egs are given off with the body waste when the eggs get into the water , they break ,freeing an undeveloped worm which will swim for about sixteen hours and then die .
The scientists thought that there must be develop worm lives .
When a scientist studying snail in the Nile River found an undeveloped worm in the body of a snail , the true answer was found .
Now it is known that if the undeveloped worm finds a snail in the water , it enters it body .
Within a month , it reproduces thousands of tiny worms , when these tiny worms are given off by the snail , they swim for as much as three days looking for a human body to enter .
They can get into someone bathing , washing , swimming , fishing , working in rice field , performing any of the activities that take people in pool of slow moving streams .
 |
| Photo Credit :sciencepicture |
These tiny worms dig through the skin of their victims , enter the blood stream and flow throuh the body.
In time they develop into adult worms , able to lay eggs which will reproduce on being passed from the human .
On reaching water , they will set free undeveloped worms which enter the bodies of the snails , thus starting again the round of man to snail to man .
Exactly when the snails that carry bilharzia and their worms came to the Americas is not known ,
Most Doctors think they probably arrived with the African slaves brought to Brazil to work in the wet fields of the coast .
The slave ships had few comfort for their passengers but the one thing they could not do without was water .
If they allowed too little water , then the valuable slaves arrived dead .
So , water was brought from the slow moving stream of the African coast and in it the snails crossed the Atlantic , when the old water was emptied into the streams of Brazil , the New World received another problem from the old .
It grows steadily more serious as man remakes his surrounding in ways which help the snails .
Places which hold back flowing water , and farms with rice fields are bad.
Poorly planned water systems in warm lands allow places where snails can grow in great numbers .
In Brazil , authorities consider snail fever , or bilharzia , their greatest health problem .
More than four million people are already infected .
What is more , the disease appears each year in new districts , carried , and it is believed , by people from the dry north-east .
Snail fever can be cured , when treated early , four out of five cases yield to the new medicines , but these often produce other bad effect in the patient and sometimes kill the patient instead of the worm.
The most promising line of attack appears to be against the snails .
With mankind behind in the race with the snail , health workers tried to kill the snails in pool by running electricity through the water , with no success .
Others brought different kinds of snails from Puerto Rico , which were supposed to eat their worm-carrying cousins , but didn't work either .
In 1950 , the world health organization made it possible for a team of Brazilian and American scientist to work on new poisons against the snails.
The results are still uncertain
They showed that snails can be cleared from an area by spraying , but that reinfection is a greater threat than had been thought originally ,.
As things now stands , getting rid of the snails does not appear probably in the near future.
Whether large-scale spraying programmes to control the snail are worth their cost is a question .
Authorities in Washington favour the idea of spraying ; those in Rio de Janeiro have their doubts .
The health center in a small town in Brazil was located in a small house on a dusty road .
The walls had holes in them and the roof let in the rain .
'our greatest problem is lack of money' , remarked the doctor sorrowfully .
Forty patients and three pretty nurses dressed in white were crowded into a tiny waiting room .
Most of the patients had come on foot from great distances to be examined or treated for snail fever .
one old man was from a town 170 miles away ; he had ridden on top of a truck to see if the people at the health center could cure him 'as you did to the woman next door' he could not remember having been in a pool of water or stream during the past thirty years.
He thought he might have picked up the disease forty years ago while building bridges .
His case was so bad that little could be done for him , he kept saying , ' but you cured the woman next door ' .
From the waiting room , i went into the office where the young doctor of the health center seated behind his old desk asking questions .
The patient was a woman about to have a baby , she sat leaning on the desk with her head resting on her weak hands and answered the doctor's question in a low , tired voice.
She was twenty eight , she was married and she had nine children living .
Further questioning showed that she had all the usual signs of snail fever : such as fever , loose body waste , and stomach pain.
She also went inside the water often to wash clothes as did all the women suffered from the disease .
There were no latrines in the village.
The doctor gave her a talk on how the disease moves from person to snail and back to person , he told that since here was an early case , it could probably be cured but that the medicine was powerful and taking it was dangerous .
'That is nothing' , she said 'i am quite an old woman and i do not have fear of sickness or of medicine , But i do not want my baby to have this thing , will my baby have the disease ?
Yes , if you are not cured of it , but i think we will have you well before the baby is born .
But will i get the disease again when i do the washing ?
' if you into the pond , you probably will '
Where else can one wash ?
' talk to the people of your village about building a public washing place , in the meantime , you should take your clothes to the nearest village that has a public place .
' Yes , doctor' , she said , sounding tired again . ' but we a poor village ' .
' None of the villages is rich ' said the doctor . ' some have people who value their children's health more than others ' .
How can i get the people in my village to build a public washing place ?
'Talk to the nurses on the way out , they will tell you how to do it .
Here , i thought as i listened , is something of importance to a nation , to the whole world .
A people organizing themselves , in spite of being so poor , and trying to stop disease , rather than depending on outside help .
If only more people in the world would do this , there will be much less illness.
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