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. Petri Dish of 3 mini microbes. 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. |
