Dwight Bowman
When Cornell veterinarians found half-foot-long worms living in their feline patients, they had discovered something new: The worms, Dracunculus insignis , had never before been seen in cats. Published in the February issue of the Journal of Feline Medicine and Surgery, the findings document the first proof that this raccoon parasite can infect cats. The female D. insignis worm can grow to be almost a foot long and must emerge from its host to lay eggs that hatch into larvae. It forms a blister-like protrusion in an extremity, such as a leg, from which it slowly emerges over the course of days to deposit its young into the water. When Dr. Jennifer Pongratz '99 found one of the female worms in a Massachusetts cat and Dr. Sara Sanders '98 found several in a New York cat, they sent samples to Cornell's Animal Health Diagnostic Center and the lab of Professor of Parasitology Dwight Bowman; both suspected Dracunculus . "The problem is you can't tell the exact species by looking at female worms," said Dr. Araceli Lucio-Forster, a researcher in Bowman's lab and the paper's lead author. "You need males to tell the species, because only they have distinct characteristics, such as different shapes of tail protrusions, to tell one from another." Bowman's lab collaborated with Dracunculus experts at the Centers for Disease Control to study sections of the worms in detail and conduct molecular analyses to confirm the identification.
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