Abstract
Cryptosporidium species are important intestinal pathogens with widespread distribution in humans and other hosts. Whereas the parasite causes acute and self-limiting gastroenteritis in people with healthy immune systems, many reports on this infection around the world are limited to people with defective or suppressed immune systems who suffer from a persistent and deadly infection. Using laboratory-serological and molecular methods for the detection of Cryptosporidium species in immunocompromised and healthy human samples, recent studies in Iran indicated that the prevalence of Cryptosporidium species in different samples varied between 0 to 14%. The samples in Iranian studies included human fecal and diarrheic samples from diarrheic children, patients with gastroenteritis, immunocompromised individuals, and people in contact with livestock. Furthermore, some species were reported based on molecular studies including Cryptosporidium parvum and Cryptosporidium hominis. Some studies have also reported Cryptosporidium meleagridis. In this review study, data were collected regarding the prevalence of cryptosporidiosis in high-risk individuals such as children and immunocompromised individuals. The results revealed that the higher prevalence of C. parvum in Iranian studies in the last 10 years may be attributed to the transmission of infection from animal sources.
Highlights
Cryptosporidium is a protozoan parasite of the phylum Apicomplexa that infects the margins of the gastrointestinal tract epithelial microvilli in a wide range of vertebrate hosts including humans [1]
Cryptosporidiosis is more dominant among young children in developing countries that causes severe diarrhea similar to cholera [5, 6]
The obtained results from various studies indicated that C. parvum and C. hominis accounted for 90% of human infections in most areas, and some studies reported C
Summary
Cryptosporidium is a protozoan parasite of the phylum Apicomplexa that infects the margins of the gastrointestinal tract epithelial microvilli in a wide range of vertebrate hosts including humans [1]. The application of these methods is especially important in diagnosing clinical and environmental samples with low parasite numbers, detecting species differences and the genetic relationship between Cryptosporidium parasites, and examining the relationship between Cryptosporidium and other Apicomplexa These methods are used in epidemiological studies and geographical diversity of parasites [38], The details of which are provided in Table 1 [39,40,41,42,43,44,45,46,47,48,49,50,51,52,53,54,55,56,57,58,59,60]
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