The beautiful world in which we live, unfortunately, is inhabited by hundreds of creatures that are only engaged in what causes us trouble, and sometimes even threaten our lives. One enemy from the army of such parasites is a faceless microscopic amoeba, causing a deadly ailment of amoebiasis. Treatment should begin immediately, and disinfection must be carried out in the outbreak. Amoebiasis is very insidious, because amoeba parasites, once in our intestines, are able to spread with blood to other organs, where it is extremely difficult to detect them. Especially life-threatening if amoeba gets into the brain. To prevent this from happening, you need to rush to the doctor at the first signs of the disease. Let's take a closer look at the following questions: where does amebiasis come from, symptoms and treatment of an ailment, and most importantly, preventive measures that must be taken so as not to be encountered at all.
Causative agent of amoebiasis
To begin with, we will draw a portrait of the simplest unicellular creature, called the amoeba dysenteric, or, in scientific terms, Entamoeba histolytica. It differs from its relatives by the more modest sizes of the pseudopods and the body as a whole. This amoeba lives exclusively parasitically, and only we humans can become its victims. The tiny parasite is so cunning that it has managed to infect more than 900 million people on Earth, rewarding them with a disease such as amoebiasis. Treatment of the disease, begun in a timely manner, has good predictions. If you do not rush to the doctor and self-medicate, you can pay with your life. Dysenteric amoeba can exist in three completely different forms:
1. Cysts. They can be likened to eggs. They are round, very small, up to 12 microns, covered with a dense two-layer shell, are immature (within less than 4 cores) and mature (exactly 4 cores inside). It is cysts that are responsible for the infection of healthy people. Formed in the patient’s body, they go out with feces. They live in the environment for about a month, and in water for 3-4 months, and many disinfectants are unable to cope with them. Therefore, all this time you can easily catch amoebiasis, the treatment of which we will consider a little later.
In the human stomach, cysts remain at rest. Their shells dissolve only in the small intestine. There, a mature quad-core individual, called maternal, divides, turning into 8 daughter single-core.
2. Translucent form. Amoeba daughters feed on the microbes that inhabit our intestines, grow intensively and gradually move from the small intestine to the colon. While they are conditionally harmless.
3. The fabric form. Having reached the large intestine, the grown amoebas invade its walls, where they begin to multiply rapidly. The intestines are ulcerated, and millions of new parasites are excreted in the feces. When they thicken, young amoeba retract their pseudopods, are rounded, double-coated, and turn into cysts.
The cycle repeats.
Infection pathways
From the foregoing, it is clear that only cysts are involved in the infection. Small and extremely tenacious, they are quickly settled in the district from feces. Flies, cockroaches, and some other insects help this. Sewer waste, which, as you know, is not specially treated, is used in the fields as an excellent fertilizer or simply poured into the environment. It also helps to expand the habitat of amoebas. They do not live in animals, birds, fish, only in man.
Another convenient way for cysts to find a new victim is to get them on household objects with the dirty hands of those who have already been struck by amoebiasis. Patients may not begin treatment immediately, but even if these people take timely measures, they are carriers of the infection, while cysts continue to secrete from their intestines.
Thus, the pathways of infection with amoebiasis are as follows:
- dirty hands;
- drinking water from rivers, ponds, any open water bodies;
- the use of unwashed fruits and vegetables.
There are three other infection routes:
- anal intercourse;
- using one towel and wearing shared linen with a carrier of amoebiasis;
- transmission from a sick mother to a baby if she does not observe hygiene.
Intestinal amoebiasis in adults, symptoms and treatment
The disease occurs more often where the climate is warm, but in the summer it is recorded in our latitudes. Europeans can pick up amoebiasis while traveling in exotic southern countries and bring it home from there. If a person has a strong enough body, cysts and even luminal forms of amoeba live for a relatively long time in the digestive tract without causing disease. If immunity is weak, amoebiasis can begin to manifest itself already on the seventh day after infection. In adults, the symptoms and treatment depend on where exactly the amoeba settled in the body. If it is the intestine, intestinal amoebiasis is diagnosed. Amoebas inhabit almost all of its departments - the cecum, ascending, colon, sigmoid and straight. Dozens of erosions and ulcers of various depths and diameters (up to 3 cm) are formed in the walls of the intestine, sometimes it comes to perforation and peritonitis. In any case, the intestinal mucosa becomes inflamed, pus accumulates in the ulcers.
Symptoms
- temperature;
- lethargy, weakness;
- pain in the intestines;
fever;
- loose stools.
Important: severe diarrhea in the early days of the disease is observed only in 10% of infected.
In the future, all add symptoms:
- frequent stools (liquid, with pus and blood);
- signs of dehydration (dry lips, tongue, skin, weak turgor);
- Signs of intoxication (headache, bouts of vomiting, nausea);
- exhaustion.
Symptoms of extraintestinal liver amoebiasis
Parasites that have fallen into the bloodstream are spread over other organs. Most often, the liver suffers, but the lungs, brain, pericardium, cornea, spleen, and skin are also suitable for them. If this happens, extraintestinal amoebiasis is diagnosed, the treatment of which depends on the location of the parasites. Sometimes there are amoebas in other organs even after they are eliminated in the intestine.
A liver infected with amoebiasis functions quite well, and parasites are not displayed in blood tests. The exception is ALPL - alkaline phosphatase. With hepatic amoebiasis, its values ​​are higher than 140 IU / l.
A purulent bag (abscess) is formed in the liver, which, if the means for treating amoebiasis are incorrectly selected, can perforate. Then its contents are poured into the abdominal cavity, internal bleeding appears, sepsis may occur.
Symptoms of amoeba in the liver:
- aching pains in the side on the right, often spreading under the shoulder blade and / or shoulder;
- the intensity of pain in the right hypochondrium decreases when the patient turns on his left side;
- hepatomegaly (an increase in the boundaries of the liver);
- pain on palpation;
- nausea;
diarrhea
- temperature;
- sweating, chills;
- loss of appetite and, as a consequence, weight.
Symptoms of lung amoebiasis
This complication is possible for two reasons:
- amoeba with blood entered the lungs from the intestines;
- drugs for the treatment of amoebiasis in the liver were not selected correctly, as a result of which an abscess broke in the liver and pus poured into the pleural cavity.
When parasites enter the lungs with blood, the symptoms should alert:
- persistent cough with sputum, in which there is an impurity of blood;
- shortness of breath;
- temperature;
- chest pain.
Without proper treatment, a purulent abscess forms in the lungs. In this case, the patient has:
fever;
- high soreness in the place of the abscess;
- Signs of heart failure.
At the opening of suppuration, a cough appears with chocolate-colored sputum, glossitis, pharyngitis.
Diagnosis of pulmonary amoebiasis includes a blood test, an x-ray, a fecal cyst test, a sputum and pleural fluid test, and serological tests.
Amoebiasis of other organs
Rarely, but still there is amoebiasis of the skin. The disease is characterized by ulcers, most often observed in the abdomen, perineum and buttocks. Usually the wounds are deep, dark at the edges, have an unpleasant odor.
Brain amoebiasis is one of the most painful complications of the disease. It is characterized by severe, not stopping headaches, convulsions, impaired sensitivity, paralysis. An abscess or a tumor of brain tissue may develop. Focal symptoms are different, depending on the localization of the formation of an abscess in the brain and coincide with the corresponding neurological disorders. Treatment of amoebiasis in adults and children that occurs outside the intestinal zone is carried out with the obligatory prescription of antibiotics in tandem with tissue amoebicides (Metronidazole, Dehydroemitin, Hingamin). With brain amoebiasis, nootropic drugs are added to the medication complex.
With amoebiasis of the liver and skin, in addition to the main medicines, “Diyodokhin”, “Intestopan”, “Mexform” are prescribed.
If chemotherapy does not give the expected result and in the presence of abscesses, surgery is performed.
Chronic amebiasis
Dysenteric amoeba can settle in our intestines for years, that is, the acute form of the disease becomes chronic. This happens when the treatment of amoebiasis in adults and children was carried out incorrectly, not completely or not at all. Patients, having suffered a month or a little more, begin to experience the desired relief. Abdominal pains go away, diarrhea also, general health improves. This stage is called remission, which pleases about a month, and sometimes up to three to four months. It begins to seem to the person that the ailment has receded. But after remission, there are always new exacerbations during which everything is repeated again. This form of the course of chronic amoebiasis is called relapsing.
There is a second form called continuous. With it, the characteristic signs of amoebiasis either increase or decrease, but never stop completely.
Symptoms of chronic amoebiasis:
- loss of appetite, leading to weight loss, anemia;
- decreased performance, vitality;
- fatigue;
- asthenic syndrome;
- vitamin deficiency;
- hepatomegaly;
- tachycardia;
- in the intestine polyps can form, narrowing of the intestine, perforation of its walls, bleeding.
Diagnostics
Before starting treatment of intestinal amebiasis, a differentiation of the pathogenic flora, identified in the feces of the patient , is carried out. There may be not only dysenteric amoeba, but also intestinal amoeba (Entamoeba coli), dwarf amoeba (Endolimax nana) or others, and in order to confirm the diagnosis of amoebiasis, it is necessary to detect dysenteric amoeba and it is in the tissue form. If in the feces only their cysts, or luminal forms, the diagnosis is made - the carrier of amoebiasis. Differentiation is carried out by PCR. In addition to fecal tests, colonoscopy is performed for intestinal amebiasis.
Treatment
Anyone with a diagnosis of amoebiasis has been treated with antibiotics and amoebicides in a hospital. Metronidazole, Ornidazole, Tinidazole, or other similar drugs that inhibit dysenteric amoeba are prescribed. In the complex, drugs of the tertacycline group that are active against this parasite are prescribed.
At the end of the main course, an additional, including amoebicides, acting on the luminal forms is prescribed. This is “Clefamide”, “Etofamide”, “Paromomycin”. The same drugs are attributed to people in whom only cysts and luminal forms of amoeba are found in the feces.
ethnoscience
Since without proper therapy, amoebiasis can lead to death, treatment with alternative means of this ailment is possible only as an addition to the main course. Basically, the help of healers is reduced to stop bloody diarrhea in patients. There are dozens of recipes that help with this problem. Some of them:
- Film from chicken stomachs. It is separated, thoroughly washed, dried, crushed and eaten 2 or 3 times a day.
- Dry tea leaves. Chew and swallow an incomplete teaspoon with water.
- Oak bark. (Medication for adults). A teaspoon of dry crushed bark should be filled with 400 ml of cold but boiled water and infused for 8 hours. Ready to drink a day.
- Widely used blueberries, bird cherry, sea buckthorn, hawthorn, mountain ash. The cooking recipe is identical for all plants - 100 grams of dried berries are poured with 400 ml of boiling water, insisted and taken 100 ml per day. Only cherry berries need to take only 10 grams.
- Garlic. They clean it, grind it, measure 40 grams and fill it with half a glass of vodka, let it brew. Each time, half an hour before the meal, take 15 drops of the drug.
Amoebiasis in children: symptoms and treatment
This disease is practically not observed in infants. But babies from one to three years old get sick most often because they, having learned to walk, want to explore the world around them and do this mainly with their hands. And children over three years old already understand that you can’t pull everything in your mouth. Parents should consider these features and protect their child from infection as much as possible.
Symptoms of amoebiasis in babies:
- diarrhea (the main and most important symptom);
- moodiness;
- refusal of food;
- pain in the tummy;
- temperature (may rise slightly or to high levels).
In children, diarrhea is not very frequent at first, about 6-7 times a day, feces are diluted, mucus may be present in them. In the future, urges become more frequent up to 20 or more times, feces are secreted very thin, with blood and mucus. The child at this stage becomes lethargic, refuses to play, complains of abdominal pain, nausea.
Extraintestinal types of amoebiasis in infants are infrequent. Their symptoms are the same as in adults. The acute form of the disease without proper therapy after three to four weeks becomes chronic.
Diagnosis is based on an anamnesis and analysis of feces (it contains mucus, red blood cells, cysts, eosinophils). This analysis is performed several times to rule out an error. In some cases, the child undergoes a serological antibody test, but he begins to "work" only after 2 weeks from the onset of the first symptoms. A blood test for acute amoebiasis does not give results, but in chronic cases there is an increase in ESR and eosinophils, a decrease in hemoglobin.
Treatment of amoebiasis in children is carried out in a hospital. The drugs Osarsol, Delagil, antibiotics of the tetracycline group, Flagil, Trichopol, Fasyzhin, Meratin, vitamins, Bififor, Simbiter are used. Particular attention is paid to restoring the fluid lost by the body, for which the child is given plenty of water (with vomiting in the spoon, but very often). So that there is no loss of salts, it is advisable to make a solution for drinking: 1 liter of water, plus 1 tsp. without a hill of salt and soda, plus 2 tbsp. l sugar, mix everything until the components dissolve, heat to +37 ° C before use.
Prevention
Like any intestinal infection, amoebiasis can be prevented if you observe hygiene, wash your hands before eating and after visiting the toilet, wash all products bought or torn off on personal land, boil water taken from open water. In addition, it is necessary to destroy the peddlers of cysts - flies, cockroaches.
At the first signs of amoebiasis, you need to hurry to the doctor, and not engage in self-healing, even with the most proven "experienced" recipes. This will prevent infection with amoebiasis of relatives and friends.