Pest Hunters

In these days, with a bit of guilty delay, I read a beautiful book "Spillover" that tells in a pleasant way the problem of zoonoses, that is the passage of animal microorganisms to humans, with all the consequent epidemics such as AIDS or Ebola, one of the most recent nightmares of our society. An important part of the work is the narration of these pathologies through personal stories and the stories of researchers. Since as a young man in a short time between the eighties and nineties of the last century, along with a handful of "Enthusiasts", I managed to systematize the clinical aspects of a parasitosis then unknown, blastocystosis, I decided to tell the thread of memory and publications this story. With what moral? That in an era of hyper-technological medicine, increasingly limited to a few shrines, with intelligence you can also in the Italian province, at the margins of our world, do a good research and change the "fate" of an "anonymous" parasite, Blastocystis precisely. This is a story perhaps not as exciting as those told in "Spillover", but that has its own dignity and deserves to be read and known.