Tropical medicine and parasitology : official organ of Deutsche Tropenmedizinische Gesellschaft and of Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ)
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Trop. Med. Parasitol. · Dec 1992
First record of Angiostrongylus cantonensis (Chen, 1935) (Nematoda: Metastrongylidae) in the Dominican Republic.
Rats, Rattus norvegicus, trapped in some sections (barrios) of the city of Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic showed that 5 of them from two barrios harbored the nematode Angiostrongylus cantonensis in the pulmonary artery. Macerated and digested terrestrial snails, Subulina octona, collected from the backyards of houses where the rats were trapped contained L2 and L3 larvae of the nematode. ⋯ Gastrointestinal hemorrhage, a rare symptom due to another species, the American A. costaricensis, which occurs in mesenteric arterioles of rodents and humans, is in the recent literature; the patient was a 41-year old Dominican. Thus the Dominican Republic is the first country in the Western Hemisphere to have the two species of Angiostrongylus.