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Parasites Definition, examples, consequences for humans and animals
The title suggests a horror film, a conspiracy myth, or a metaphor for fellow human beings who psychologically exploit others. The biologists Monika Niehaus and Andrea Pfuhl provide an insight into real life forms that control the behavior and psyche of their hosts and in humans not only cause illness, but also psychological changes - parasites.
The strategies developed by evolutionary syphilis pathogens, the rabies virus, or the toxoplasmosis pathogens to settle down with their hosts are more fantastic than any Hollywood director could imagine. "The arms race between parasites and their hosts began before the mitochondrial evolution and will not end until evolution itself is over." James Moore
contents
- Better than a thriller
- Parasites are omnipresent
- Brainwashed to suicide
- Into the mouth of the enemy
- Destruction of body chemistry
- Complexity is no protection
- War in the body
- From defense to manipulation
- spirit and body
- lice
- Nesting place human
- Dreadlocks and Weichselzöpfe
- The medusa hair
- Superstition: A gift for lice
- A lousy society
- typhus fever
- Aztecs and Napoleon
- Ship and dungeon fever
- Psycho parasites
- depression viruses
- The St. Vitus Dance
- Straight to the brain
- Neurologists and psychiatrists
- rabies
- Unrestrained aggression
- Schizophrenic cats?
- Conclusion
Better than a thriller
Nature dwarfs the plots of the best thriller authors. Unfortunately, few biologists are able to tell the abilities of living things to survive and reproduce as excitingly as they are. For Niehaus and Pfuhl this is not true: From the "embarrassing relationship" (lice) on "Little Red Riding Hood and the fear of the evil wolf" (rabies), they take the reader on a journey from the steppes of Central Asia (plague) in the Greek Roman antiquity (elephantiasis) leads to the Renaissance (syphilis), and from werewolves (rabies) to rats that are sexually on cats (toxoplasmosis).
The authors Monika Niehaus and Andrea Pfuhl describe in their book the influence of lice and other parasites on humans and animals. (Image: pridannikov / fotolia.com) Parasites are omnipresent
"Parasites are omnipresent, virtually no living thing is safe from their unwanted affection," that's how the authors begin their cultural history of the plague ghosts. The most sophisticated parasites do not force their victim to defend themselves, but are invisible to the victim because they manipulate the psyche of their host.
This is, according to the authors, not only for the "usual suspects", the people, dogs or cats plague. For at least 500 million years various parasites already control insects, spiders and crabs.
Brainwashed to suicide
Gurus who brainwash their faithful to suicide, have biological role models: A threadworm programmed in the rainforest of Latin America ants so that birds pick them. He has the abdomen of the infected ant blush because the birds love red fruit.
Then he gets the ant to climb a tree where red berries grow. A bird eats the "ant-berry". If he excretes his feces, this in turn serves ants as food, which they feed to their larvae. The next ant colony is infected, and the game begins again.
Into the mouth of the enemy
Scratch worms alter the level of serotonin in flea crabs. This distorts the signal transmission from the eye to the brain. The light of the sun appears dark, the crab swims out of the mud to the water surface, where birds eat it. The bird droppings ensure that the children of the scratching worm again infect flea crabs.
Another scratching worm causes its host to swim directly into the open mouth of a predatory fish.
Destruction of body chemistry
Parasites can change complex patterns of behavior by acting directly on the hormones of their victims, such as acting a virus that infects the caterpillars of the sponge spinner. It destroys the hormone, which suggests to the caterpillars saturation, whereupon they pupate. Without this signal, the caterpillars continue to eat until they reach the treetops where they die.
The viruses in the remnants of caterpillars now sail through the air and thus come to other locations of the sponge spinner.
A certain virus ensures that the caterpillars of the sponge spinner crawl into the topmost treetops and die there. (Image: Eileen Kumpf / fotolia.com) Complexity is no protection
Flea crabs and spongy caterpillars are simply structured creatures that are easy to manipulate. But also the many times more complex brains of mammals are not immune to such changes in the psyche.
More than a dozen infectious agents are believed to trigger psychiatric illnesses. These include rabies and syphilis, including Borrelia, chlamydia, herpesviruses, streptococci and Toxoplasma gondii.
War in the body
The human body is not defenseless against these enemy invaders. The biologists write: "The first barrier is the immune system. It releases so-called cytokines that allow it to fight the intruder. Then again, the parasite is on the train, by influencing the attack in his favor. "
From defense to manipulation
The authors cite psychoneuroimmunologist Shelley Adamo: "Perhaps there is only a small evolutionary step between manipulating the immune system (with which the parasite seeks to prevent its destruction) and manipulating it to force its host to produce substances that affect the nervous system and influence its behavior. "
According to Niehaus and Pfuhl, evolution promoted parasites that manipulate the immune system and those that affect the nervous system. If parasites have reached the brain, they are protected, because here they are less exposed to the attacks of the immune system.
spirit and body
There is no separation between psyche and body. According to the authors, the psyche is not a metaphysical thing; insects are crazy about parasite infestations - humans as well.
lice
In the first chapters, the authors devote themselves to the "classical" troublemakers of man. These include the Filzlaus, vulgar "sack rat" called, the beard, eyelash, eyebrows and pubic hair attacks, "what makes them the most embarrassing representative of the triumvirate," said the authors. The other two in the league are the subspecies head and the clothes louse.
They are actively climbing from host to host and roam around wherever people are, in buses and trains, clothing and bedding.
To reliably kill lice, it usually suffices to wash the infested clothing, bed linen and towels at 60 degrees. (Image: jozsitoeroe / fotolia.com) The clothes louse is, according to Niehaus and Pfuhl, very young in the evolutionary history. It did not develop until man's ancestors lost their fur and wore clothes. She accompanied the ancestors of the Native Americans of North Asia on the Bering Strait.
The lice are easy to fight. They rely on the body temperature of humans, and that's why it's enough to wash lice-infested clothing at 60 degrees Celsius.
Nesting place human
Lice have to take blood every few days otherwise they will dry out. In the clothes louse then itchy wheals form. After eating, the animals mate, two hours later, the females lay the eggs. Up to 300 eggs put head lice in nits on the hair shafts of the host, lice on the seams of the clothes. The "glue" can not be washed out with water alone. The larvae hatch after 1-2 weeks and are sexually mature after the third moult, ie in about four weeks.
Dreadlocks and Weichselzöpfe
Today, about 6% of children between the ages of 6 and 12 are attacked by head lice, and uninvited guests prefer long hair. A clear sign is the "Weichselzopf", in which hair shafts are felted into a kind of dreadlocks.
That's why dreadlock wearers are often considered unhygienic in many older people whose childhood lice were ubiquitous.
The medusa hair
Such "Läuselocken" were already found in a mummy from the 7th millennium BC, as well as mummies from ancient Egypt. The authors do not call the chapter "Medusa Hair" without reason. The Medusa, a mythological figure of Greek antiquity, wore snakes on its head instead of hair. One thesis is that this myth has the hair matted by lice as its source. According to the authors, shaving the head and body hair of Egyptians, Greeks and Romans is probably the reason to keep the lice away.
What they do not mention are skinheads. These originally portrayed their origin from the English working class: DocMartens were the shoes their fathers wore during factory work; the hair was generally shaved off the working-class children to prevent lice infestations.
Head lice are often associated with dreadlocks. (Image: stakhov / fotolia.com) Superstition: A gift for lice
The matted hair was surrounded by superstition, which was inseparable from folk medicine. So the "Weichselzopf" should draw illnesses out of the body and offer a home to evil spirits, which otherwise would have taken root in the body.
The idea that harmful forces could be dragged from the interior of the body to the surface of the body in order to render harmless there remained in academic medicine until the 19th century. The cause could be, what the authors do not mention, in turn be parasites: tape or nematodes harm the body, if they leave the body by a worming, they are harmless.
With this superstition our ancestors made sure that the lice spread all over the place. It was a misfortune to cut off the louse's braids; the evil spirit then became homeless and avenged himself on the former wearer of the braid.
A lousy society
Until the 19th century lice were omnipresent, according to the authors, and not only among the poor. The rich dressed in furs and these offered a paradise to the parasites. The bloodsuckers were even considered a sign of brimming manpower. In the tradition of Galen's Humoral Doctrine, contemporaries believed that lice attracted harmful juices from the body.
typhus fever
It was only in the 20th century that medicine recognized that head and body lice can transmit dangerous diseases. Countless parasitic people became infected with typhus fever, which leads to hallucinations and, very often, to death.
Aztecs and Napoleon
It is believed that two million inhabitants of the Aztec empire died when the Spaniards introduced the pathogens with their lice and, according to the authors, "responsible for the heavy casualties on Napoleon's Russian campaign was less the military genius of the opposing forces than the devastating influence of General Winter "And" General Laus ".
The transmitters are Rickettsia, in turn parasitic bacteria that live in the clothing and hair parasites of humans and use them as a vehicle. Today Borrelia still use the lice and reach the human skin when we crush lice.
Lyme disease is caused by certain bacteria, the Borrelia. However, these require lice and ticks as carriers for infection. (Image: Zerbor / fotolia.com) Ship and dungeon fever
With the lice, typhus was everywhere and spread most where many people were in a small space: in prisons, among sailors and in the slums.
The ship's doctor James Lind (1716-1794) was the first to realize that the "ship's fever" had to do with the sailors' clothes, because it spread when the sailors went ashore, and that it was the same illness as the " Dungeon fever "acted. Later terms such as "industrial fever" and "Irish fever" point to where the rickettsiae later hit - in the shantytowns of industrial workers and the impoverished Irish.
Psycho parasites
In the second part, Niehaus and Pfuhl devote themselves to fleas and worms, the plague and elephantiasis, and in the second part to the pathogens that directly alter the brain's functions - syphilis and bornavirus, rabies and toxoplasma.
No pathogens shaped the sexual morality of Europe more than a spiral-shaped tiny, Treponema pallidum, the causative agent of syphilis, according to the authors. They write further: "And Treponema also influenced psychiatry, because for a long time neurosyphilis sufferers still made up most of the inmates of" asylums "."
depression viruses
Largely unknown are viruses that cause mental disorders that medicine knows as Bipolar Disorders and Depression. Bornaviruses settle in the cell nucleus and head for the limbic system.
The authors ask if the diagnosis of depression is not a general store, in which various symptoms with different causes are traded.
The bornavirus nests in infected persons in the limbic system and can break out if the affected person is exposed to emotional stress that weakens the immune system. The longer this stress lasts, the sooner the nucleus will become an excess of Bornavirus proteins that disrupt the neuro-lattice of the brain.
In carriers of bornavirus, weakening the immune system through chemotherapy, stress or AIDS can lead to recurrent depression.
In this case, the depression does not go back to a trauma, it has no psychological cause, but a parasite is the culprit. Conversely, trauma to an infected person can cause immune defenses to fail, activating the parasite.
Depression can also be caused by parasites. (Image: Focus Pocus LTD / fotolia.com) According to the authors, markers for the virus are significantly more common in people with mental illnesses such as schizophrenia or depression than in people without these diseases, and this applies to Germany as well as to the Czech Republic, Australia or Iran.
Veterinarian Bernd Iben states: "(the Borna virus) corresponds to the melancholic subtype of major depression."
The St. Vitus Dance
Streptococci are bacteria. A few of their strains can trigger a rheumatic fever. In rare cases, this leads to an infestation of the brain, which leads to uncontrolled twitching of the hands and facial muscles. This phenomenon refers to medicine as a "Veitstanz" based on mass hysteria of the early modern period.
The disorders of this "Veitstanzes" include panic attacks such as compulsive acts and symptoms that are considered classic mental complaints: separation anxiety, increased irritability and suicidal thoughts.
For example, obsessive-compulsive disorder was exhibited by Shakespeare and Lady Macbeth, who are constantly tormented by nonsensical thoughts and constantly repeating actions by metaphorically washing off the blood that clings to their hands.
The pediatrician Susan Swedo suspected the same mechanism behind the different complications of a streptococcal infection. According to the bacteria deceive the immune system, and this attacks the bacteria as well as the body's own proteins. Thus, the proteins on the surface of the heart muscle and the heart valves, the synovial membrane and the nerve fibers are very similar to the streptococcal proteins.
The tics and obsessive-compulsive disorder that cause streptococci are called obsessive compulsive disorder. A previous infection with the bacteria is therefore related to a sudden change of nature.
Streptococcus pyogenes thus triggers "neurological symptoms via willing helpers, by using the immune cells of its victims," according to the authors.
In rare cases, streptococci can also trigger neurological symptoms. (Image: Kateryna_Kon / fotolia.com) Straight to the brain
Pathogens also penetrate directly into the brain. Niehaus and Pfuhl write: "The poisons of the cholera bacterium and the gas burners work as highly chemical lockpots by opening the tight-fitting doors of the blood-brain barrier (...) to the brain tissue."
Neurologists and psychiatrists
In the United States raging about the streptococcal consequences of a conflict of competence between neurologists and psychiatrists. By definition, the neurologists take care of the nerves, the body, while the psychiatrists deal with the psyche.
This dividing line is only a construction. Viruses, bacteria and fungi "can find the way into the brain and let it play crazy", say the authors.
Niehaus and Pfuhl note: "The age-old concept that" madmen "are possessed by evil spirits seems more modern in terms of the microorganisms invisible to the naked eye than the diagnostic and statistical guide to mental disorders."
However, today medicine explicitly recognizes that mental illnesses can be triggered by microorganisms. Prof. Karl Bechter of the University of Ulm says: "There is clear evidence today that severe mental illness can be linked to infections or the immune processes they cause."
rabies
"It's simple, tiny, and incredibly powerful," virologist Nathan Wolfe writes of the rabies virus, adding, "It kills virtually every host it infects," adds the authors..
The obsessive-compulsive addictions of rabies sufferers have been known since antiquity and gave their name to the disease. Great in the meaning of insane and angry as an expression of uncontrolled frenzy marks the psychological changes of those affected by the rabies virus.
According to Niehaus and Pfuhl, the fear of the wolf in our ancestors was due to the experience with the disease, also known as "dogswuth" - a thesis that the author of this review also advocated in his master's thesis.
As an infectious disease, however, the "mad rage" remained unknown for a long time. This is, according to the authors, at their long incubation period. Between animal bite and clear symptoms can pass weeks, months and even years. In the first century u.Z. then Greek doctors recognized that the "water aversion in humans" and the "anger disease" of dogs was the same disease.
Since no one knew the cause, the treatments were wrong and tormenting. For example, "worm cutters" cut a string of connective tissue under the tongue from antiquity to the 19th century, believing that this "rabies" set off the plague. The virus organizes its propagation excellently. It captures the brain, affecting the immune response of its host.
It is found in the limbic system as well as in the thalamus, brainstem and basal ganglia and "provides a fascinating clinicopathological link with alertness, (...) abnormal sexual behavior and aggressiveness. (...) No other virus is so diabolically well-adapted that it can make the host furious and thereby ensure its transfer to another host. "
The widespread fear of wolves is, according to the authors, due to the fact that in the past the animals often transmitted rabies. (Image: andrewbalcombe / fotolia.com) Unrestrained aggression
The virus alters the level of cytokines, while lowering serotonin levels, triggering unchecked aggression. The pathogen paralyzes the cranial nerves at the same time, so that the victim's throat is paralyzed. Now it can no longer swallow saliva, but the highly infectious saliva "foams in front of the mouth". The unrestrained aggression causes the victim to bite wildly - the sluggishness guarantees that the bites transmit the pathogen.
Wolves who travel up to 70 kilometers per day (the authors write 60) are ideal propagators of the virus. The horror stories of wolves biting humans and dogs and leaving behind "madmen" indicate that rabies infested with rabies posed a great threat.
The authors conclude: "Our deep-rooted wolf fear presumably goes back to the (historically rather rare) killing of humans by wolves, but to the cruel, almost deadly disease that they spread and which claimed countless victims."
Schizophrenic cats?
Streptococci, according to the authors, may be responsible for OCD, the Borna virus for depression, and rabies leads to delusional aggression and hypersexuality. Next, the authors discuss toxoplasmosis, which spreads cats to humans, a mutable infection triggered by a protozoan.
People are a bad host, for example, infected by cat feces, because only in cats, the parasite can reproduce sexually. In rodents, it causes increased levels of dopamine in the pleasure center of the brain and synthesizes dopamine. The smell of a cat now sexually attracts a rat goat. At the same time, the parasite stimulates the production of testosterone, thus ensuring that it spreads further by means of infected ejaculate.
Toxoplasma infected chimpanzees feel magically attracted to their predator leopard, suggesting that the pathogen was originally specialized in large cats and used primates (such as us) as a means of transport.
Niehaus and Pfuhl cite the thesis that even mental illnesses such as schizophrenia can go back to toxoplasmosis. This would be mainly due to the increased by the pathogen dopamine levels, which coincides with symptoms of schizophrenia: delusions, paranoia, megalomania, hallucinations. Toxo infections are also exceptionally common in people who have diagnosed schizophrenia.
Conclusion
Niehaus and Pfuhl do not write "only" as biologists about parasitic life forms. At the same time, they design an unusual view of the cultural history of man, in which microorganisms decided wars (typhus) that changed values and norms (syphilis) and deepened fears in the unconscious (rabies)..
At the same time they critically criticize the fantasy of a separation of psyche and mind on the one hand and the body on the other hand in humans. This construction shapes the image of man in Europe - from antiquity to today.
Biological parasites trigger mental disorders and altered hormones lead to personality changes. The book is a warning sign to look closely at whether or not a parasite has taken root in one or the other childhood trauma of people with psychiatric symptoms. That would require a completely different treatment.
Niehaus and Pfuhl have presented a fulminating work with a narrative art that is unusual in the natural sciences and in the best sense of the word provide enlightenment. Anyone who is interested in natural medicine in the literal sense and does not confuse nature with esoteric Schweringelei, for the "Psycho Trojans" are a must. (Dr. Utz Anhalt)
Specialist supervision: Barbara Schindewolf-Lensch (doctor)
Monika Niehaus / Andrea Pfuhl
The Psycho Trojans - How parasites control us
S. Hirzel Verlag / 2016