Sleeping Sickness
Are you tired? Working too hard? Feeling a bit cranky? Do you think
you might have sleeping sickness? This little fellow will sing you a
lullaby you'll never forget.
Children, parents and educators will enjoy using these educational
plush toys to teach about hygiene, disease and the human body. Each
microbe comes with a description of the disease it causes or function it
performs. Use these fun, non-threatening toys to emphasize the
importance of washing hands and preventing sickness in social settings. Surface wash, air dry. Trypanosoma
brucei is a parasitic protist species that causes African
trypanosomiasis (or sleeping sickness) in humans and animals in Africa.
These parasites have two hosts - an insect vector (carrier) and
mammalian host. Because of the large difference between these hosts the
trypanosome undergoes complex changes during its life cycle to
facilitate its survival in the insect gut and the mammalian bloodstream.
It also has a unique surface coat in order to avoid the host's immune
system. There is an urgent need for the development of new drug
therapies as current treatments can prove fatal to the patient as well
as the trypanosomes. The insect vector for T. brucei is the tsetse fly.
The parasite lives in the midgut of the fly then migrates to the saliva
glands for injection to the mammalian host. The parasite lives within
the bloodstream where it can reinfect the fly vector after biting. Later
during a T. brucei infection the parasite may migrate to other areas of
the host. A T. brucei infection may be transferred human to human via
bodily fluid exchange, primarily blood transfer. |
