Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

  • NEWS AND VIEWS

A sustainable way to control the parasitic disease schistosomiasis

A trial in Senegal has tested an innovative method for tackling a common human parasitic disease. The approach reduced infection numbers and also offered agricultural and economic benefits.
  1. Nathan C. Lo

    1. Nathan C. Lo is in the Division of Infectious Diseases and Geographic Medicine, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305, USA.

    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed  Google Scholar

  2. Benjamin Arnold

    1. Benjamin Arnold is in the Francis I. Proctor Foundation and in the Department of Ophthalmology, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, California 94158, USA.

    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed  Google Scholar

Schistosomiasis, one of the most common human parasitic diseases, is a global menace because of its high rates of infection and contribution to poverty. Over the past two decades, global campaigns using antiparasitic medication have been carried out to combat the scourge of the disease. In 2022, the World Health Organization released guidelines1 to further expand the scale of these mass-treatment campaigns, with the goal of eliminating schistosomiasis as a public-health problem by 2030. Although this strategy has yielded clear public-health benefits2, the following key question remains: what solutions can be devised to further combat schistosomiasis and forge a sustainable future? Writing in Nature, Rohr et al.3 identify an innovative and transdisciplinary solution to reduce cases of schistosomiasis.

Access options

Rent or buy this article

Prices vary by article type

from$1.95

to$39.95

Learn more

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

Nature 619, 703-704 (2023)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-02178-4

References

  1. World Health Organization. WHO Guidelines on Control and Elimination of Human Schistosomiasis (WHO, 2022).

    Google Scholar 

  2. Deol, A. K. et al. N. Engl. J. Med. 381, 2519–2528 (2019).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  3. Rohr, J. R. et al. Nature 619, 782–787 (2023).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. King, C. H., Sutherland, L. J. & Bertsch, D. PLoS Negl.Trop. Dis. 9, e0004290 (2015).

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Competing Interests

N.C.L. reports personal fees from the World Health Organization related to work on public-health guidelines for schistosomiasis.

Subjects

Latest on:

Nature Careers

Jobs

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing

Search

Advanced search

Quick links