Browsing by Author "Mutani, Alex Mark"

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    Some aspects of Parasitaemia in the Laboratory white mouse during infection with Trypanosoma brucei (Plimer & Bradford, 1899)
    (University of Dar es Salaam, 1979) Mutani, Alex Mark
    An investigation of the behavior of some haematological indices and carbohydrates was done in mice infected with trypanosome brucei. These trypanosomes had been syringe passaged in mice for about ten years. The trypanosomes were found to have lost their polymorphism, and the course of the disease in mice was of the acute type. The haematological indices investigated were packed cell volume or haematocrit (PCV%), red blood cell accounts (RBC), percentage haemoglobin (Hb%), and percentage mean corpuscular haemoglobin concentration (MCHC%). It was found that despite the 10% fall in PCV in infected animals, increasing parasitaemia had no significant fall in Hb and MCHC values with increasing parasitaemia. These results show that the demage sustained by the host in this investigation as regards haematological indoices, was mainly due to the red cells being inadequately filled with aemoglobin, a fact which is reflected by the lowered MCHC. Blood glucose studies revealed that infected mice had also observed that starting from the prepatent period of parasitaemia infected animals showed a significant decrease in blood glucose levels with increasing parasitaemia. The present study has shown that the trypanosomes used in this investigation decreased the blood glucose levels of the hosts. The animals tried to make for this loss by mobilizing glucose from hepatic glycogen was furthermore consumed by the parasites in the blood. This is supported by the fact that towards terminal parasitaemia, when almost all the hepatic glycogen was depleted, infected animals were losing weight, suggesting that during this stage they were mobilizing sugars from other sources in their bodies. The results of this study suggest that when T. brucei is syringe-passaged in mice for a long time, not only does its virulenceincrease, but also the course of the disease becomes different from what has been observed by other workers.