Letters To The Editor
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2016. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Exp Med. May 20, 2016; 6(2): 55-57
Published online May 20, 2016. doi: 10.5493/wjem.v6.i2.55
Comments on human eurytremiasis in Brazil
Hudson Alves Pinto, Alan Lane de Melo
Hudson Alves Pinto, Alan Lane de Melo, Laboratório de Taxonomia e Biologia de Invertebrados, Departamento de Parasitologia, Instituto de Ciências Biológicas, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte 30123-970, MG, Brazil
Author contributions: Pinto HA and de Melo AL wrote and revised this letter.
Conflict-of-interest statement: The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Correspondence to: Hudson Alves Pinto, PhD, Laboratório de Taxonomia e Biologia de Invertebrados, Departamento de Parasitologia, Instituto de Ciências Biológicas, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, PO Box 486, Belo Horizonte 30123-970, MG, Brazil. hudsonalves13@ig.com.br
Telephone: +55-31-34092978
Received: November 18, 2015
Peer-review started: November 19, 2015
First decision: February 2, 2016
Revised: March 14, 2016
Accepted: April 5, 2016
Article in press: April 6, 2016
Published online: May 20, 2016
Processing time: 181 Days and 12.8 Hours
Abstract

Eurytremiasis is an important parasitic disease of cattle that was recently suggested to be a neglected and emerging human disease in Brazil. Based on a misinterpretation of the life cycle of the parasite, it was suggested that a great number of people could be infected with this fluke in the country. In the present letter, aspects of the life cycle of Eurytrema spp. are revisited and clarified. The mechanism of transmission previously reported for the few accidental human cases involved the ingestion of raw or undercooked insects (grasshoppers and crickets) harboring the infective metacercariae. In reality, the zoonotic potential of Eurytrema species is extremely low, and human eurytremiasis is not, and probably never will be, a zoonotic disease in countries where entomophagy is not a common food habit.

Keywords: Eurytrema; Parasite transmission; Tropical medicine; Metacercariae; Zoonosis

Core tip: In the present letter, the life cycles of species of Eurytrema, pancreatic flukes of ruminants, are revised. Given the transmission of the parasite by the ingestion of infected insects, we suggest that human eurytremiasis is not a zoonotic disease in countries where entomophagy is not a food habit. Therefore, eurytremiasis should not be considered a neglected or emerging disease in Brazil.