Roundworm infection increases female fertility Scientists have – slightly improbably – discovered that infection by the roundworm Ascaris lumbricoides increases fertility in women belonging to Bolivia's Tsimane ethnic group. In their abstract, published in Science, the researchers explain that they studied "nine years of longitudinal data from 986 Bolivian forager- …
If memory serves me right, the same nematode has the interesting property of drastically decreasing the acuteness of asthma and allergies in infected people. The mechanism is still unclear - probably both production of antihistamines and adjustments to the host immune system. While having a few 40cm worms in you may seem to be a cure that is worse than the disease a lot of asthmatics will probably beg to differ.
That suggests the worms have a way to downtune heir hosts immune reaction without making the immune system itself less effective. Time to scour this worms waste products for antihistamine compounds and/or hormonal stimulants/depressors, methinks.
Time to scour this worms waste products for antihistamine compounds and/or hormonal stimulants/depressors, methinks.
They are being scored. Off the top of my head there is at least one guy in Oxford Uni who is working on that. There are a few places elsewhere too.
the same nematode has the interesting property of drastically decreasing the acuteness of asthma and allergies in infected people.
Interesting.
That would suggest it might be effective against auto-immune diseases such as arthitis, perhaps...
Vic.
Interestingly, having more children keeps husbands faithful http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1549598/How-to-keep-a-husband-faithful.html
Presumably keeping the father present makes the family unit wealthier and better fed.
We humans like to think we are kings of the hill but we are all slaves to chemistry and might be being manipulated just like farm animals (kept healthy/docile with drugs)
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2526137/
I wouldn't expect it to be a big connection. Parasites have to fly under the radar of the immune system, and so do fetuses--since they're not genetically identical to the mother, there has to be a way for her immune system to tolerate the presence of cells that ordinarily would be attacked. So we'd expect anything that tweaks the one system to have some effect on the other.
you have three realistic possibilities
either the worm affects the woman's brain and makes her more sexually receptive (similar to toxoplasmosis affecting rodent brains)
or the parasites make women reach puberty and so start breeding earlier
or there really is an immune dampening effect which reduces the threat of spontaneous abortion
you'd have to carry out behavioural research on the women to see if those with the parasites had more sex, or at a younger age
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