Hydatid infection is caused by a parasite that is transmitted by livestock animals. This project will develop a treatment for livestock animals which, when used in combination with a vaccine against the parasite, will improve the effectiveness of efforts to prevent the disease being transmitted through animals. I indirectly this will lead to a reduction in the number of new cases of hydatid disease world wide.
There is an urgent need to develop new drugs to treat human leishmaniasis, a disease that causes debilitating and life-threatening diseases in millions of people worldwide. This project will investigate whether it is possible to develop a new generation of drugs that target a novel metabolic pathway in these parasites that we have shown to be essential for virulence.
One third of the world's population is infected with the protozoan parasite, Toxoplasma gondii, which can cause life-threatening infections. This proposal will utilize new analytical technologies to understand how these parasites are able to survive in a wide variety of different host cells, how they manage to persist within brain and muscle tissue for the life of the patient and how infection may be linked to mental health disorders, such as schizopohrenia.
Schistosomiasis is a major public health problem in the Philippines with approximately 6.7 million people at risk of infection. Mass human chemotherapy has formed the cornerstone of control for decades but has failed to control the disease. Transmission reduction is a key step towards elimination and integrated interventions should target both definitive and intermediate host transmission pathways. We propose to trial integrated control strategies for the disease and expect the outcomes to have ....Schistosomiasis is a major public health problem in the Philippines with approximately 6.7 million people at risk of infection. Mass human chemotherapy has formed the cornerstone of control for decades but has failed to control the disease. Transmission reduction is a key step towards elimination and integrated interventions should target both definitive and intermediate host transmission pathways. We propose to trial integrated control strategies for the disease and expect the outcomes to have broader implications for Southeast Asia.Read moreRead less