Question: What progress have you made in your area? Have you discovered anything taht could directly help the people suffering from Schistomiasis?

Anouk Gouvras answered on 14 Jun 2012:

Good question maddybishop.
I have to admit that as this is my first job since finishing my studies I haven’t actually done that much. Perhaps the closest I got was something that I did for my PhD. I was looking at how being infected with two different species of schistosomes may have different symptoms etc compared to being infected with just one species of schistosomes. There are places in sub-Saharan Africa where people are infected with so many different parasites and they all have a combined effect on the diseases that are caused. I found that there was a difference in the disease when you were infected with two species compared to being infected with just one. This is important to both our understanding of how Schistosomiasis develops, how the parasite causes the disease and also to how we need to control it. Public health and research programs need to identify which areas have more than one species of schistosome present otherwise they could be missing an important aspect of the disease or they might be treating in an ineffective way simply because they assumed there was only one species and did not check for the other.

With my current job, I hope that our results will help schistosomiasis control programs identify which treatment strategy works best and is most cost-effective in each affected area. These control programs have limited amount of money and they need to use that limited money effectively. Also we need to ensure that the treatment strategy is not selecting for drug resistance in the schistosome population. Otherwise we are really in trouble, we only have one drug tr treat millions of people with.

Also I am helping the program for the elimination of Schistosmiasis from Zanzibar, if this works we hope that Zanzibar will be schistosome free and people will no longer suffer from the disease. This is a big project, we are working with the ministry of health of Zanzibar over the next 4-5 years to achieve this. It would be amazing if we succeed.