Parasitology

Biography

Biography: M V Raghavendra Rao

Abstract

Warm countries are the worm countries. Parasitic infections are more in tropical countries and cause global health problem especially in developing countries. Man today living in a world created by him that becoming more and more hostile every day owing to pollution. The parasites will continue to emerge leading to unpredictable epidemics and challenges for the clinicians and scientists. Hence there is an urgent need of surveillance and control. Advance diagnostics, tests, vaccines, therapeutics and development of new drugs are needed. Viviparity is common amongst mammals but not many provide long gestation period. To study the long term parasitic toxic effects, it is essential to use long gestation period laboratory animal model. Rats have 21 days, rabbits 30, dog 60 days gestation period. Whereas gestation period is long as in case of sheep, horses, monkeys, elephants, they are not available and viable for research because of cost procurement and maintenance. So in this situation scorpion comes handy. The gestation period of scorpion is little over ten months. It is cheap, available, viable and reliable. Hence scorpion was chosen as a research model. The subtle effects of thalidomide tragedy resulting in phocomelia, apoda etc., in the offspring leads to untold miseries and similarly good number of cases of fetal deaths, still births, teratogenices etc. The author used scorpion as model in estimation of heavy metals like Mercury and Lead in embryonic development of scorpion and noticed similar effects.