Acceptance of the 2012 Henry Baldwin Ward Medal: My Experience with Parasites

Abstract

President Kuris, Dr. Healy, Dr. Fayer, fellow members of the Society, colleagues, and friends, it is truly a great honor to accept the 2012 Henry Baldwin Ward Medal. To join a list of 50 or so prominent parasitologists whom I have long admired as a Ward Medal recipient is a very humble experience. I sincerely thank Dr. Fayer for nominating me and Dr. Mark Eberhard and Dr. David Lindsay for supporting the nomination. I am honored to be nominated and supported by these past Ward Medalists or Eminent Parasitologist recipients. I also want to thank the Ward Medal Committee members for putting their faith in me. I hope I can live up to it. Ron has given a very generous introduction of my career and research background. I will try not to repeat it and bore you with other details. As customarily done in previous acceptance speeches, I will take some time to discuss my career development, especially on how I came to be working in a public health institution as a veterinary parasitologist, and will thank people who have shaped me along the way. I will also pay tribute to prominent ASP members who have made great contributions to my research area. Hopefully, some young ASP members, especially graduate students, can follow the steps of other ASP members into our research area. Like other Ward Medalists, my experience with parasites started very early in life, but literally, I vividly remember some of my experiences with parasites. There were quite a few of them, but I will only talk about 3, 1 each for helminths, protozoa, and arthropods. As Ron mentioned, I grew up in China in the 1960s and 1970s when China was in its most difficult recent history. Back then, life was poor and hygiene was bad. I now cannot remember when I had my initial Ascaris infection, but I still remember the feeling of the movement of the roundworm in me when it was trying to make an exit after its expected lifespan. Since I experienced this from time to time for several years, I probably had multiple episodes of Ascaris infection, a common occurrence in children in developing countries. What I am not sure of is the species of Ascaris I had. In developing countries, humans are commonly infected with Ascaris lumbricoides, the human species, whereas in industrialized nations a few human ascariasis cases are caused by Ascaris suum, the species in pigs. As my family had kept a pig most of the time during my childhood, what I had could have been A. suum. I can also remember my experience with malaria, which occurred right about the same time I had ascariasis. It was really a bad experience, as I had the worst recurrent fever and chills in my life for quite a few days before the eventual diagnosis and treatment of the disease. Based on the pattern of recurrent fever, what I had was probably caused by Plasmodium vivax, which was prevalent in Hunan, China back then. Of course, the local term for the illness was not malaria and the cause of it was not Plasmodium spp. My mother told me that the reason I got sick was because I spent too much time watching snake-mating. I truly believed her, and tried very hard to avoid the ever-present snakes around my home, which was surrounded by water on 3 sides. In retrospect, the malaria I had was not of snake or other animal origin. I could have had my share of zoonotic protozoan infections, such as cryptosporidiosis, as my family always kept 1 dog, 1 pig, 1 donkey, and several chickens or ducks simultaneously. Although I experienced quite a few encounters of ectoparasites before, the experience I hated most was a flea bite. Unlike most other people who would simply develop rashes after a bite, I always had a large, shining blister at the biting site. Host preference of fleas was definitely showing on me, as I was usually DOI: 10.1645/12-89.1