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Co-infection complicates treatment
Infections rarely occur in isolation, and treating one pathogen may have unpredictable effects on another. Ezenwa and Jolles, working on wild African buffaloes, expected that because deworming relieves immune suppression, such treatment would lead to a drop in tuberculosis because the animals would clear the second infection without further intervention. Not so. Deworming did improve the lot of parasite-infested individuals, but it also increased the spread of tuberculosis among the population. What apparently happened is that the worm-free buffalo lived longer but stayed infected with tuberculosis and had longer to spread the infection among the herd.
Science, this issue p. 175
Abstract
Parasitic worms modulate host immune responses in ways that affect microbial co-infections. For this reason, anthelmintic therapy may be a potent tool for indirectly controlling microbial pathogens. However, the population-level consequences of this type of intervention on co-infecting microbes are unknown. We evaluated the effects of anthelmintic treatment on bovine tuberculosis (BTB) acquisition, mortality after infection, and pathogen fitness in free-ranging African buffalo. We found that treatment had no effect on the probability of BTB infection, but buffalo survival after infection was ninefold higher among treated individuals. These contrasting effects translated into an approximately eightfold increase in the reproductive number of BTB for anthelmintic-treated compared with untreated buffalo. Our results indicate that anthelmintic treatment can enhance the spread of microbial pathogens in some real-world situations.
