Food-Borne Trematodes: A Focus on Russia

Abstract

Parasitic diseases transmitted through food are an urgent problem in the modern world. Food trade between countries, increased demand for animal proteins, international mobility, and new exotic culinary interests all lead to a change in eating habits.

Food-borne trematodes (FBT) are zoonoses with a complex life cycle involving diverse definitive hosts and one or two intermediate hosts (fish, crustaceans, mollusks, amphibians, reptiles, and water plants).

It is not trivial to determine the true prevalence of FBT, since early stages of infection often occur without clinical manifestations and in the chronic phase of infection, clinical symptoms are non-specific. About 56 million people in the world are infected by FBT, and 75 million people in 70 countries are at risk of getting infected. Infection can result in severe liver and lung diseases and are estimated to annually cause two million life years to be lost to disability and death worldwide.

In Russia, FBT are common in areas offering favorable conditions to final and intermediate hosts including water bodies and floodplain meadows as they are commonly found in Western and Eastern Siberia, the Far East, Volga region, European South and the basins of various rivers. The most common FBTs in these areas are opisthorchiasis, clonorchiasis, fascioliasis, metagonimiasis, nanophyetiasis, heterophyiasis and paragonimiasis.

FBT infections are a serious and growing problem for public health services in endemic regions, which in turn acts as a strong motivation to develop and implement effective strategies to combat these diseases.