Endemic Paragonimus kellicotti infections in animals and humans in USA and Canada: Review and personal perspective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Infections with the lung fluke, Paragonimus kellicotti, have been diagnosed in a variety of domestic and wild animals and humans in USA and Canada. Although there are many species of Paragonimus in other parts of the world; P. kellicotti is the only species definitively diagnosed in USA and Canada. Fresh water snails (several species) and crayfish (mainly Orconectes spp.) are its intermediate hosts. Humans and animals become infected with P. kellicotti only by ingesting metacercariae encysted in the heart of crayfish. After ingestion, the fluke penetrates intestinal wall, enters peritoneal cavity, and reaches pleural cavity by direct penetration of diaphragm, 2–3 weeks post inoculation (p.i.). Young flukes penetrate lungs and become encysted in pulmonary tissue, often in pairs. Time to maturity is around 4–7 weeks p.i. Eggs are coughed up, swallowed, and are excreted in feces. Although the parasite has been known for more than a century, there has been an upsurge of human infections in the USA. Here, I review P. kellicotti infections in naturally infected hosts. Pathogenesis, diagnosis, and treatment in parasite-free cats and dogs experimentally infected P. kellicotti are reviewed to shed light on the pathogenesis of human paragonimiasis. Problems and challenges facing diagnosis of paragonimiasis, especially non-pulmonary infections, are discussed. Fluke stages are deposited in Smithsonian Museum.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".