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Toxoplasma gondii

Published on July 31, 2024   41 min

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Other Talks in the Series: Neglected Tropical Diseases

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0:00
Hello. My name is Professor Geoff Hide. I work at the University of Salford, in the UK, and my role is as a professor of parasitology. I do research on a wide range of parasites, mostly single-celled protozoan parasites. Today, I'm going to be talking about a parasite that I do a lot of work on, which is Toxoplasma gondii.
0:26
What we're going to cover in this section is we're going to look at the parasite itself, Toxoplasma gondii. We're going to look at the life cycle. We're going to consider some of the diseases that it causes, and then I want to finally move on to some current topics of interest.
0:44
Toxoplasma gondii is a parasite of cats, so it fulfills its main life cycle in the cat. We refer to the cat as a definitive host. The cat is the only host that the parasite can complete its full life cycle, which includes having a sexual stage in the life cycle. And so, essentially, it's a parasite of the cat. However, it's actually also a parasite which affects a wide range of other warm-blooded animals. It infects humans, for example. Interestingly, about one in three people on the planet have this parasite, so it's a hugely important and a hugely ubiquitous parasite.
1:28
As well as the cat, it also has a number of secondary hosts which it infects, and I've already alluded to the fact that humans are an important secondary host. But in fact, it's capable of infecting all warm-blooded animals and birds. You find it in really odd places, like, for example, in marine mammals like sea otters, dolphins, and pretty much all of the warm-blooded animals that we've looked at have been shown to be infected with this parasite. Of course, primarily as parasitologists, we're usually interested in humans, and so I'll be focusing probably mostly about humans in this talk. The other interesting thing about the parasite is its prevalence is usually very high in whatever hosts you look at. I said, in humans, about one in three of us on the planet are infected, so around about 33% of people on the planet are infected. If you sample wild animals, from various types of wild animals and from various locations, again, they are often infected at a very high frequency and often 30-40%.

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