A study on wild forest mice, which usually carry parasitic infections, found that treating one infection may aggravate another.

Scientists at the University of Edinburgh have suggested that multiple infections can “compete” with each other, which leads to a flowering of one infection after suppression of another.

Principal Researcher Amy Pedersen and colleagues at the University of Edinburgh School of Biological Sciences report on their work in the latest issue of Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

In a press statement, Pedersen said their study “for the first time demonstrated that treating a single infection can have unpredictable effects on other diseases that may be present in the patient”. In the introductory part of the article, scientists note that in nature infections rarely go alone - most often the macroorganism is home to several infectious agents at once.

It would be reasonable to assume that the interaction between parasites can have a significant effect on the severity, spread of infections, response to treatment. The authors note that today “our understanding of the interaction of infections is based on observational studies that may be unreliable in this regard”.

Scientists decide to conduct an experiment on wild forest mice infected with worms nematodes. They treated them for nematodes with a special narrow-spectrum anthelmintic drug for several weeks, during which mice were tested for dozens of other common parasites.

It was found that during treatment, the level of nematodes fell, but the level of some other parasites increased. Only one of the concomitant parasites did not “bloom” during the treatment of nematodes, but this reaction was short-lived.

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Pedersen summed up: “Our study provided evidence of strong competition between parasites inhabiting a macroorganism..

But to understand this phenomenon and assess the impact of drug therapy on it, many more scientific works should be carried out ”.

The richness of the microflora that inhabit the human body is also evidenced by a recent study, in which scientists calculated that the various microorganisms that inhabit our body contain 3.3 million different genes compared to 23,000 genes in the human genome. One thing can be said: to study this incredible variety, scientists will need years of hard work.

medbe. ru.