Cestodes – causes of diseases with an unexplained etiology

AUTHORS : Salnikova T.V. 

RELEVANT UNIVERSITIES : “Eliseeva Methodological Center”, Moscow, Russia

YEAR : 2003 | Category : Educational

Cestodoses are, as you know, diseases of humans and animals caused by tapeworms from the Cestoda class, belonging to the type Platelminthes (flatworms). Currently, about 1800 species of tapeworms have been identified. In medicine, representatives of two orders are important – tapeworms and tapeworms, which differ among themselves in the structure of their bodies, as well as in the cycles of development. In tapeworms, there is one intermediate host – large vertebrates, in tapeworms – two: the first is invertebrates, the second is fish. Among the cestodes, there are species in which the phenomenon of host change disappears.

A person for this helminth is both an intermediate and a final host (eg Hymenolepis nana). Recently, however, there has been a lot of talk about the fact that, possibly, due to changes in the environment, many helminths have switched to the last type of parasitism associated with only one host, namely man (see Clark). Currently, medicine has about 30 thousand described diseases, of which only 5 thousand are curable, due to the identified etiological factor of the disease. Why are there so many diseases? There is an assumption that these are different stages or local manifestations of the same disease of the whole organism, caused by some biological pathogen.