the.com/parasitology
The study of nature's freeloaders, who pay rent in your bloodstream with eviction notices.
means The branch of biology and medicine devoted to parasites — organisms that live on or inside a host — and the diseases they cause.
from Built from Greek roots: parasitos, literally "one who eats beside another," stitched from para- ("beside") and sitos ("food, grain"), plus -logia ("the study of"). The Greek parasitos originally named a very human creature — the flatterer who showed up uninvited to dine at a wealthy patron's table — before science borrowed the word for biology's uninvited dinner guests.
- mind control
- Toxoplasma rewires rodent brains to love cat urine
- body count
- Parasites infect roughly half of all humans alive
- tongue thief
- One isopod eats and replaces a fish's tongue
- ancient enemy
- Tapeworm eggs found in 270-million-year-old fossils
- zombie ants
- A fungus steers ants to die in ideal spore spots
sleeping sickness — transmitted by tsetse fly in sub-saharan africa, affects 10,000+ people annually
guinea worm disease — dracunculus medinensis parasite, nearly eradicated from 21 countries by 2015
schistosomiasis — parasitic flatworm affecting 240 million people in 78 countries, especially sub-saharan africa