Pathology and Parasitic Diseases of Animals

Dear Colleagues,

Parasitic diseases are often the cause of growth delay, decrease of physical development and fertility, as well as of serious health problems and death in infected animals. In addition, several parasites may infect both animals and humans, raising public health concerns. The pathological changes that parasites may induce in their animal hosts are caused by a variety of pathogenic mechanisms, depending on the host/parasite relationships. In infected animal hosts, parasites may be responsible for lesions by toxic, obstructive, subtractive, traumatic, allergic, necrotic, inflammatory, and immunosuppressive pathogenic mechanisms. Parasites may also have the ability to cause tumors or tumor-like lesions in affected animals.

Histopathological features of parasitic diseases may play an important role in the diagnosis and knowledge of the severity and complications of parasitic diseases, by allowing the identification of the parasite species involved and the areas of pathological lesions, the detection of histopathological changes, particularly important for the differential diagnosis or to confirm the presumptive diagnosis of a parasitic disease or, again, by highlighting possible bacterial or viral complications and the outlook of treatment. Histopathological examination may also provide insights into the interactions between parasites and animal hosts and their impact on infected animals.

Immune-phenotipization of immune cells participating in the immune response of the animal against parasites is also very important to understand if the response is a positive or negative process for the host. Further, the recent paradigm that permits evaluating host M1 or M2 macrophage response is fundamental to have some provisional information regarding the possibility for the host of improving health conditions or not after parasite infection. 

The postgenomic era has generated unparalleled opportunities for creating and integrating systems biology data (i.e., organism‐ or cellular‐scale data produced through numerous ‐omics or systemwide technologies). This holistic approach is in direct contrast to conventional reductionist methods that ‘reduce’ systems into smaller, more tractable units. Systems‐based methods are particularly useful to study complex biological relationships that are: (1) open, with constant information exchange and a net flow of resources, and (2) stochastic, with spatial, temporal, and population heterogeneity. Host–parasite systems embody all of these defining characteristics. ‐Omics technologies are also much more efficient and economical when comparing the cumulative time, labor, and cost per gene to traditional reductionist strategies. 

This Topic Collection is devoted to collecting original papers and/or review papers dealing with histopathological features of parasitic diseases, immunopathological studies of host–parasite immune-response characterization, and host–parasite systems. It is focused on parasitic diseases caused by different parasite pathogens of veterinary interest responsible for economic losses or that may negatively affect animal and human health and welfare. Parasites affecting vertebrate and invertebrate animal species used for human consumption (e.g., bred or caught fishes, mollusks, and crustaceans) and for producing food for human consumption (e.g., bees) or that can be the vectors or the hosts of important human and animal parasitic diseases (e.g., arthropod species responsible for malaria, Leishmania, Trypanosoma and other parasite transmission; snails involved in transmission of flukes) also represent a relevant field in this Topic Collection.

Prof. Stefania Perrucci
Dr. Livio Galosi
Prof. Dr. Giacomo Rossi
Collection Editors

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