Reevaluating Biota Alteration: Reframing Environmental Influences on Chronic Immune Disorders and Exploring Novel Therapeutic Opportunities.

Environmental mismatches are defined as changes in the environment that induce public health crises. Well known mismatches leading to chronic disease include the availability of technologies that facilitate unhealthy diets and sedentary lifestyles, both factors that adversely affect cardiovascular health. This commentary puts these mismatches in context with biota alteration, an environmental mismatch involving hygiene-related technologies necessary for avoidance of infectious disease. Implementation of hygiene-related technologies causes a loss of symbiotic helminths and protists, profoundly affecting immune function and facilitating a variety of chronic conditions, including allergic disorders, autoimmune diseases, and several inflammation-associated neuropsychiatric conditions. Unfortunately, despite an established understanding of the biology underpinning this and other environmental mismatches, public health agencies have failed to stem the resulting tide of increased chronic disease burden. Both biomedical research and clinical practice continue to focus on an ineffective and reactive pharmaceutical-based paradigm. It is argued that the healthcare of the future could take into account the biology of today, effectively and proactively dealing with environmental mismatch and the resulting chronic disease burden.

The opportunistic protist, Giardia intestinalis, occurs in gut-healthy humans in a high-income country.

Giardia intestinalis, a cosmopolitan gastrointestinal protist, is detected mainly in patients with clinical giardiasis in high-income countries. In contrast, there is very little information on the presence of Giardia in asymptomatic individuals. Therefore, the aim of this study was to determine the presence and prevalence of Giardia in gut-healthy volunteers in the Czech Republic and to perform a comparative evaluation of different diagnostic methods, since Giardia diagnostics is complicated. Our results confirmed that the qPCR method is the most sensitive method for detecting Giardia and revealed a prevalence of 7% (22/296) in asymptomatic individuals. In most cases, the colonization intensity ranged from 10-1-101. A conventional PCR protocol targeting the TPI gene was used to identify the assemblages. However, this protocol had limited sensitivity for Giardia amplification, effectively detecting colonization above an intensity of 104. In addition, Giardia was detected in 19% of the animals, which were closely associated with the study participants. However, due to methodological limitations, zoonotic transmission could not be clearly confirmed. Notably, contact with animals proved to be the only factor that had a significant impact on the incidence of Giardia in gut-healthy humans.

A Cross-Sectional Study on the Occurrence of the Intestinal Protist, Dientamoeba fragilis, in the Gut-Healthy Volunteers and Their Animals.

Dientamoeba fragilis is a cosmopolitan intestinal protist colonizing the human gut with varying prevalence depending on the cohort studied and the diagnostic methods used. Its role in human health remains unclear mainly due to the very sporadic number of cross-sectional studies in gut-healthy populations. The main objective of this study was to expand knowledge of the epidemiology of D. fragilis in gut-healthy humans and their animals. A total of 296 stool samples from humans and 135 samples from 18 animal species were analyzed. Using qPCR, a prevalence of 24% was found in humans in contrast to conventional PCR (7%). In humans, several factors were found to influence the prevalence of D. fragilis. A more frequent occurrence of D. fragilis was associated with living in a village, traveling outside Europe and contact with farm animals. In addition, co-infection with Blastocystis spp. was observed in nearly half of the colonized humans. In animals, D. fragilis was detected in 13% of samples from eight species using qPCR. Our molecular phylogenies demonstrate a more frequent occurrence of Genotype 1 in gut-healthy humans and also revealed a likely a new protist species/lineage in rabbits related to D. fragilis and other related organisms.

Host specificity and basic ecology of Mammomonogamus (Nematoda, Syngamidae) from lowland gorillas and forest elephants in Central African Republic.

Syngamid strongylids of the genus Mammomonogamus undoubtedly belong among the least known nematodes with apparent zoonotic potential and the real diversity of the genus remains hard to evaluate without extensive molecular data. Eggs of Mammomonogamus sp. are frequently found in feces of African forest elephants (Loxodonta cyclotis) and western lowland gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla) in Dzanga-Sangha Protected Areas. Using sedimentation-based coproscopic techniques, we found the eggs of Mammomonogamus in 19·7% elephant and 54·1% gorilla fecal samples with 8-55 and 1-24 eggs per gram of fecal sediment for elephants and gorillas, respectively. We used a combination of light microscopy, scanning electron microscopy and analysis of cytochrome c oxidase subunit I (cox1) and a partial sequence of 18S rDNA isolated from single eggs to test the hypothesis of possible Mammomonogamus conspecificity in gorillas and elephants. Whereas 18S rDNA sequences were identical in both gorillas and elephants, we distinguished seven different haplotypes within the cox1. Two haplotypes were found in both gorillas and elephants suggesting sharing of Mammomonogamus. Assignment of the parasite to M. loxodontis is proposed. Provided sequences represent the first genomic data on Mammomonogamus spp.