Practical Exercises in Parasitology

Abstract

edited by David W. Halton, Jerzey M. Behnke and Ian Marshall. Cambridge University Press, 2001, (£35.30) (hbk)(XVIII + 461 pages)ISBN 0 521 79104 9Practical Exercises in Parasitology describes 50 well-tried practical exercises that are used in teaching parasitology at the undergraduate level. This book does not attempt to cover the whole field of parasitology (e.g. the Arthropod parasites are not included), except for copepods on fish and Anopheles. The book presents very useful examples for practical classes in this discipline and the exercises cover a wide range of complexity. The layout of the book is simple and does not contain any fancy colour photographs of parasites, but includes drawings and photographs where appropriate.The book begins with general instructions on health and safety, good laboratory practice, gives guidance on how to write up exercises and provides the criteria recommended for assessing coursework. The book ends with an addendum containing a list of suppliers in the UK and the USA. Exercises are divided into seven chapters: (I) Observational Exercises on Parasites; (II) Ecology; (III) Physiology and Biochemistry; (IV) Pathology and Immunology; (V) Chemotherapy; (VI) Molecular Biology and, (VII) Behavior. The format for the exercises implies that concise and clear instructions for teachers and students must be given, that the necessary equipment, consumables and parasite sources are indicated, that expected results are presented in conjunction with ideas for further exploration, additional information and references. Detailed information on the parasites and their hosts is often lacking in the text, but this additional information can be found in the references cited. Virtually all exercises are on live parasites – this is obviously preferable to teaching on dead materials. However, it is doubtful whether ethics committees will always approve the necropsy of experimental animals (rodents) or wildlife (fish) for the sake of some of these exercises alone, because the expected results are available from the literature. However, this would not be a problem when live parasites are obtained from slaughtered farm animals or from necropsies performed for approved ongoing research projects.For most exercises, no previous training is expected which can be a disadvantage. For instance, the first exercises on molecular biology are just general exercises. Clearly, it is necessary to start with such exercises when the student has no background on molecular biology. Our experience with undergraduate medical biology students is that they already have had some exposure to molecular biology, and it is much more rewarding to start with exercises in which molecular biology is used as a tool in parasitology.The most important feature of this book is that it makes the fingers itch to try out the exercises, or similar ones better adapted to the local situation. The clear descriptions and the suggestions as to where materials can be obtained make it easy to adopt most of the exercises into the teaching programs. The exercises are not comprehensive and more exercises can be added to this book.In summary, I believe that this book will be a very useful acquisition for departments involved in teaching parasitology. It was a good initiative of the British Society for Parasitology to enable publication of this book, and the principles behind it could be extended by accumulating other exercises in the same format into a database that is accessible to anybody involved in teaching parasitology.