• Question: hi, what year did you find about a parasite

    Asked by Iqramir to Claire, Franco, Koi, Linda, Mark on 14 Jun 2016.
    • Photo: Franco Falcone

      Franco Falcone answered on 14 Jun 2016:

      Hi Iqramir

      is your question what year did we discover about parasitology? If that’s the case, I don’t know, sometime in the 1980s probably

    • Photo: Mark Booth

      Mark Booth answered on 14 Jun 2016:

      Hi Iqramir
      I first learnt about parasites in 1988 – my second year at University. There was a lot of parasitology research at Imperial College and the lecturers were therefore interested in teaching us parasitology. If there had been no interest in parasitology at the University I might have taken a different career route.

    • Photo: Arporn Wangwiwatsin

      Arporn Wangwiwatsin answered on 14 Jun 2016:

      Hi Iqramir, I learnt about parasites while at a University. It was one of the modules I did as part of the Zoology degree. Funny enough though, when I think about it I actually did find out about parasites when I was probably ~14 years old!!! but…. it was taught as part of a health education class rather than biology! so all I learnt at 14 was what is the name, what diseases they can cause, how to prevent the infection, is there a treatment, and is it fatal… nothing about their biology and how they live!! I felt indifferent to them at the time, but when I learn about them again, now about their biology, they are just(!) fascinating! Do let me know if you want some resources to learn more about them…ask another question so I notice 🙂

    • Photo: Claire Bourke

      Claire Bourke answered on 16 Jun 2016:

      Hi Iqramir, when I was 4 years old my family moved to Australia via south east asia and we had to take really bitter tablets to stop us getting malaria during our time in thailand and malaysia (my mum gave us smarties to take away the bitter taste!) and we had to sleep under mosquito nets; so I suppose that was when I was first aware that there were nasty infections that could be spread by mosquitoes, although I didn’t know the word ‘parasite’ back then. As a teenager I moved to Uganda to live for a year and had to have lots of vaccinations for infections, take anti-malarial medicines again and was also warned to avoid swimming in some fresh water sources because of the risk of infection with parasitic worms called schistosomes, which I had never heard of before! So that was the first time I heard about schistosomes and I have ended up studying them as part of my research for the past 10 years!

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