ICOPA (International Congress on Parasitology) 2014 hosts first Blastocystis research forum

In 2014, ICOPA hosted the world’s first Blastocystis research forum in Mexico City.

Work on the following topics was presented by:

Pauline Scanlan – Blastocystis Surveillance in UK population
Rune Stensvold – Blastocystis in IBS patients
Pablo Maravilla – Host Genetics + Blastocystis
Ken Boorom (BRF) – Confounding factors in Blastocystis Population Studies

Slides are available for Pablo Maravilla’s presentation, as well as Ken Boorom’s presentation.

BRF’s contribution focused on why data from population studies sometimes shows a pathogen to be uncorrelated with symptoms, conflicting with data from animal studies and human treatment studies that show it causes illness.  Briefly, when the prevalence of an pathogen becomes very high in a population where acquired or innate immunity also exists, the presence of an organism can become uncorrelated or even inversely correlated with symptoms.  A similar paradoxical inverse correlation can occur if all etiological causes are not detected and analyzed as a group.  The presentation provided a quantitative analysis to prior work contributed by BRF to Springer’s Text, Blastocystis: Pathogen or Passenger

Attendees at the Blastocystis Forum, ICOPA 2014

Attendees at the Blastocystis Forum, ICOPA 2014

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