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What’s Eating You?

It’s a jungle out there.

Humans can be infected by more than 1,400 parasites – viruses, bacteria, fungi, etc. It can be bad enough when one nasty parasite takes hold – it’s certainly no fun to be stricken with tuberculosis – but what happens if you have two simultaneous infections? If one infection is diagnosed and treated with a regimen of drugs, will the other infection go away by itself? What if you take the drugs and the other infection gets worse?

“We don’t understand enough about many of these relationships to know if treating one infection can also curb another simultaneous infection – whether it may figuratively kill two birds with one stone – or if treatment of one infection hampers healing of the other,” says Emily Griffiths, an NC State post-doctoral researcher and lead author of a new study examining parasite-human relationships.

Emily Griffiths and colleagues created a "food web" to show how groups of parasites interact in humans.
Emily Griffiths and colleagues created a “food web” to show how groups of parasites interact in humans.

Griffiths and colleagues from the United Kingdom and Switzerland provide the first glimpse at how multiple parasites interact within humans. Using data from more than 300 published studies, the researchers compiled a list of many of the parasites that infect humans, a list of the parts of the body consumed by each parasite, and the ways the immune system responds to each parasite.

The information was used to construct a large network of multiple infections in humans, a veritable “food web” of infections inside the human body.

Building this network revealed some previously unknown infection patterns and suggests treatment strategies for multiple infections, Griffiths says. For example, groups of parasites often share similar parts of their host, and these groups are prime candidates for coordinated treatment.

Future research aims to understand better how and why multiple infections occur in humans, and the consequences for mortality, Griffiths adds.

A study describing the work was published this week in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Griffiths also studies a particular infection – dengue fever. She is currently working with colleagues at NC State on models for the four different types of dengue fever and the mosquitoes that transmit them.