Screening of South American anti-helmintic plant infusions on Trichinella spiralis

AGUDELO I; DIAZ M; VILA CC; RICCO R; SARACINO MP; LOMBARDO T; BALDI PC

Congreso; Keystone Symposia Conference T4. Helminths: New Insights from Immunity to Global Health; 2019

Helminth infections are still aninternational concern, not only affecting people in Latin America but alsothroughout the world. Given the fact that they can cause chronic infections,and in some cases, even public health emergencies, we turned our attention to medicinalplants used in the South American folk medicine as antiparasitic treatment. Trichinella spiralis is a parasitenematode which infects a broad range of mammals, among them humans and pigs,causing not only epidemiological problems but also important economic losses topork meat producers. The aim of this work was to assess the efficacy of Dysphania ambrosioides (L.) Mosyakin& Clemants (Chenopodiaceae), Tagetesminuta L. and Baccharis salicifolia(Ruiz & Pav.) Pers. (Asteraceae) infusions on the survival of T. spiralis live stages: muscle larvae(ML), adult worms (AW) and newborn larvae (NBL) in in vitro and/or in vivoassays.For in vitro assays, ML and AW were incubated for 2, 4 and 24 h whileNBL were incubated for 3 and 24 h with the infusions at different dilutions.After incubation, parasite mortality percentage (%M) was evaluated. We foundthat D. ambrosioides and T. minuta infusions produced a high %Mof ML and AW when incubated for 24 h. B.salicifolia infusion affected the survival of three parasite stages at 24 hand also that of NBL at 3 h, both in a dilution dependent manner. Given thislast result, we carried out an in vivoassay in which Swiss mice were orally infected with 200 ML and were treatedwith one dose/day for 3 days of PBS, mebendazole or B. salicifolia infusion starting at day 3 p.i. ML were recovered byartificial digestion at day 30 p.i. in order to determine the parasite burden(ML/g). We observed that B. salicifoliainfusion reduced the parasite burden by 77.5% whereas mebendazole reduced it by95.6%, both compared to the PBS group.In conclusion, the high protection observedsuggests that these infusions are active invitro against T. spiralis and, inthe case of B. salicifolia, theinfusion is also effective in in vivoconditions.