Dan Colley, director of UGA’s Center for Tropical and Emerging Global Diseases, was quoted in a New York Times article about a study being conducted to find a vaccine for schistosomiasis.
Seventeen volunteers in the Netherlands agreed to host parasitic worms in their bodies for 12 weeks to help advance research toward a vaccine for the chronic disease that afflicts more than 200 million people a year, primarily in sub-Saharan Africa and South America.
A Dutch ethics board agreed with researchers who said the risk is extremely small. At the end of the study, all of the student volunteers will be given Praziquantel, which is supposed to clear any infection and kill the remaining parasites. Colley, a schistosomiasis researcher, said the drug is “not terribly effective.”
Given that the worms’ life span is five to 10 years, “That is a long time to have something as ugly as a schistosome living in your blood vessels, putting out excrement and things,” said Colley, who also is a professor in Franklin College’s cellular biology department.