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Name: John
Status: Student
Age: 20s
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Country: N/A
Date: N/A
Question:
I am working on a senior seminar project.

Question: Is there such a protozoan as "Giardia gingivalis"? I cannot seem to find anything on this at all. If not, do you have other suggestions of human pathogenic protozoa that cause oral disease? (my emphasis is dentistry, obviously).


Replies:
Giardia is a genus of protozoa, but G. gingivalis is not known to me. There are several bacterial species causing periodontal diseases, of which porphyromonas gingivalis is a common one.

Do you mean Entamoeba gingivalis? this is a parasite that causes periodontic infections. A search for this organism in the PubMed (public database at Natl. Libr. Med.) resulted in 45 papers, several of which in foreign language. Seems that there is not a lot known on this organism. Would be a good subject for your study?

For a start, see Clin Infect Dis 1998 Sep;27(3):471-3 about E. gingivalis in HIV-infected patients, or

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov:80/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&lis t_uids=7844431&dopt=Abstract

which is the abstract of a paper on the incidence of the infection.

Good luck.

Trudy Wassenaar

I'm not aware of a protozoan called Giardia gingivalis. However, Giardia lamblia is a parasite of the intestinal tract that usually is passed by poor sanitation conditions (like a water source contaminated with human waste) and causes acute diarrhea lasting typically a couple of weeks. There's pretty complete and intelligible information on that parasite at a site at Tulane:

http://www.tulane.edu/~wiser/protozoology/notes/intes.html#gl_path

Christine Ticknor
Ph.D. Candidate
Yale University
New Haven, Connecticut


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