Researchers Identify Treatment Targets For Cryptosporidium Parvum

Cryptosporidium parvum has long been the scourge of freshwater in the developing world. Its presence was announced a decade ago in the United States. It infected over 400,000 people – the largest waterborne-disease outbreak in the county's history. Its rapid ability to spread, combined with an incredible resilience to water decontamination techniques, such as chlorination, led the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the United Sates to add C. parvum to its list of public bioterrorism agents. However, there are no reliable treatments currently for cryptosporidiosis, the disease caused by C. parvum, but that may be about to change with the identification of a target molecule by investigators at the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (RI-MUHC). The findings of this study have been recently published in the Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy (AAC) journal.

"In the young, the elderly and immunocompromised people such as people infected with HIV/Aids, C. parvum is a very dangerous pathogen. Cryptosporidiosis is potentially life-threatening and can result in diarrhea, malnutrition, dehydration and weight loss," says first author of the study, Dr. Momar Ndao, Director of the National Reference Centre of Parasitology (NRCP) at the MUHC and an Assistant Professor of the Departments of Medicine, Immunology and Parasitology (Division of Infectious Diseases) at McGill University.

Source-Eurekalert