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You have to hand it to the intelligent [sic] designer. He or she leaves very little to chance in his/her determination to make humans sick or suffer. Here, for instance, we have an example of the lengths he/she has gone to to turm people in southeast Asia blind with liver and intestinal flukes, using three different species of trematode and four different species of snail.
Trematode flatworm parasites that cause severe ocular infections in humans have been found to use these common snails as their secondary host.
Like a lot of flat-worm parasites, this one has the problem of getting back into its host when its eggs are expelled into the environment. This one does it by infecting a secondary host that is eaten by a tertiary host that itself is eaten by a human. The tertiary host is a fish that is commonly consumed by humans, sometimes only partially cooked.
Now researchers at Silpakorn University, Thailand, led by Kitja Apiraksena, working in South Thailand have discovered that snails commonly found in fresh and brackish water in southeast Asia can carry the parasite as the secondary host. The Eureka Alert news item explains:
"Trematode infections are major public health problems affecting humans in southeast Asia," explain the scientists. "Trematode infections depend not only on the habit of people, but also on the presence of first and second intermediate host species, resulting in the endemic spread of parasites, such as intestinal and liver flukes in Thailand".
The snails of concern belong to the genus Stenomelania, have elongated and pointed shells and can be found near and in the brackish water environment of estuaries in the Oriental Region, from India to the Western Pacific islands. Worryingly enough, science does not know much else about these snails to date. Further, these species are hard to distinguish from related trumpet snails, because of the similarities in their shell morphology.
In order to provide some basic knowledge about the parasitic worms in Thailand and neighbouring countries, the research team collected a total of 1,551 Stenomelania snails, identified as four species, from streams and rivers near the coastline of the south of Thailand in Krabi, Trang and Satun Provinces. Of them, ten were infected with trematodes. The parasites were found at seven of the studied localities and belonged to three different species. In Krabi Province, the researchers observed all three species.
Speculating on their presence, the scientists suspect that it could be related to the circulation of sea currents, as the flow of water along the Andaman coast is affected by the monsoon season.
Abstract
Stenomelania snails (Fisher 1885) have been reported from the coastal regions of the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean, spanning India to Australia. Here, the species diversity and distribution of these snails in the south of Thailand are recorded. The snails were also examined for trematode infections in 13 locations in three Provinces, viz. Krabi, Trang and Satun, along the coast of the Andaman Sea. A total of 1,551 snails were in five morphs tentatively identified as Stenomelania aspirans, S. crenulata, S. punctata, S. torulosa and the closely-related Neoradina prasongi. With 10 infected snails, the trematode infection rate was 0.64%. The cercariae were categorised into three species from two morphologically-distinguishable types, viz. parapleurolophocercous cercariae (Haplorchis taichui and Procerovum cheni) and xiphidiocercariae (Loxogenoides bicolor), through the morphological characterisation of the larval stage. These trematodes were also analysed using the internal transcribed spacer subunit II region to confirm the species identity at generic and infrageneric levels.
Apiraksena, Kitja; Namchote, Suluck; Komsuwan, Jirayus; Dechraksa,
Wivichuta; Tharapoom, Kampanat; Veeravechsukij, Nuanpan; Glaubrecht,
Matthias; Krailas, Duangduen
Survey of Stenomelania Fisher, 1885 (Cerithioidea, Thiaridae): The potential of trematode infections in a newly-recorded snail genus at the coast of Andaman Sea, South Thailand
Zoosystematics and Evolution 96(2): 807-819. https://doi.org/10.3897/zse.96.59448
Copyright: © 2021 The authors. Published by PenSoft.
Open access
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)
Survey of Stenomelania Fisher, 1885 (Cerithioidea, Thiaridae): The potential of trematode infections in a newly-recorded snail genus at the coast of Andaman Sea, South Thailand
Zoosystematics and Evolution 96(2): 807-819. https://doi.org/10.3897/zse.96.59448
Copyright: © 2021 The authors. Published by PenSoft.Open access
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)
The research was published in the open access journal Zoosystematics and Evolution.
This is of course yet another example of parasitism that you can never get a creationist to discuss without them resorting almost immediately into religious dogma and abandoning science altogether by invoking "The Fall", so giving away the fact that Creationism is not the alternative scientific explanation that Creationist frauds claim, but Bible literalism dressed up to look sciencey. Any explanation which invokes the magic actions of an unproven deity ceases to be science and loses any explanatory powers.
Creating an organism with the purpose of making another organism sick can't honestly be described as the act of an all-loving deity, so, by refusing to acknowledge that they are the result of a mindless, amoral, natural process, they inevitably present their god as a malevolent sadist and they reveal more about themselves than they might wish to, if they regard an entity who would come up with something like the massively complex system such as was discovered in these host-parasite relationships in Thai snails and trematodes, just to get revenge for some ancient wrong, as the act of a loving, intelligent designer.
Very many more examples of these supposed creations by Creationism's malevolent designer are in my richly-illustrated book, The Malevolent Designer: Why Nature's God is not Good, available in paperback or ebook for Kindle, as a companion volume to The Unintelligent Designer: Refuting the Intelligent Design Hoax.
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