Please wait while the transcript is being prepared...
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%.
