Javier Baquera Heredia
The American British Cowdray Medical Center, Mexico
Title: Pathology of parasitic diseases
Biography
Biography: Javier Baquera Heredia
Abstract
Parasitic diseases are prevalent all over the world, since ancient times and all across the social strata. For the regular practicing pathologist, the mere fact of recognizing a non-human histology as a possible metazoan is an easy task. But the morphologic clues needed to assign a taxonomic position to a given structure, from phylum to genera, requires some knowledge of invertebrate comparative microanatomy and embryology. Parasitic diseases can be related to adult forms, to larva and or eggs, to pseudoparasitic conditions, or, as is the vast majority of cases, to false parasites and artifacts. Been confronted at the microscope with a possible parasitic structure, one must try to define if one is dealing with a piece of a structure, or with the whole of it. In an ideal setting, we have a perfect axial/transversal section. This kind of oriented preparation allows us to define if the possible parasite has a body cavity or not. This simple fact has important implications for diagnostic classification. Next in importance, is the structure of the body wall (whether a tegument versus cuticle), the ornaments of the wall (hooks, spines, ridges), and finally, the details of the internal organs. We will use three parasitic diseases which are relatively common in Mexico, to discuss the abovementioned criteria: Human gnathostomiasis, angiostrongylosis costaricensis and furuncular myiasis