It is a beguiling scene - as the water is dangerous with a 60% prevalence rate of schistosomiasis.
Schistosomiasis is the second most common parasitic disease in the world after malaria - with 90% of cases in Africa.
In addition the goal is to reduce and control these diseases: schistosomiasis, river blindness, soil-transmitted helminthes, Chagas disease and visceral leishmaniasis.
They also conduct clinical trials in the Minas Gerais state of Brazil, where 68% of people have hookworm and 45% have schistosomiasis.
Americans and Europeans rarely suffer from schistosomiasis, which afflicts 200m people worldwide, or lymphatic filariasis, which makes life miserable for another 120m.
Hotez and his team of 35 researchers are currently working on vaccines for hookworm infection and schistosomiasis, a chronic disease caused by parasitic worms.
Somewhere in the middle may be schistosomiasis, a debilitating disease caused by a parasitic flatworm carried by water snails, which affects 200m people worldwide.
ECONOMIST: Genetics and infectious disease: The germ of an idea | The
"I've been infected with schistosomiasis for two years, " says Gadiaga Diop from the village of Lampsar, about 20km (12 miles) from the city of Saint Louis.
Other impacts associated with inadequate sanitation include an estimated 260 million people infected with schistosomiasis, a potentially fatal parasitic infection spread through contact with contaminated water.
INSERM, a French medical research agency, who is based at the University of the Mediterranean in Marseille, has found that 70% of the susceptibility to schistosomiasis is under the control of one or two genes that regulate liver repair.
ECONOMIST: Genetics and infectious disease: The germ of an idea | The
应用推荐