Susan Jarvi urgently needs research funding to continue her rat lungworm disease research.
Jarvi is a professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the Daniel K. Inouye College of Pharmacy at the University of Hawaii at Hilo.
State Sen. Russell Ruderman, D-Puna, was hopeful the Legislature would help.
But a bill that would have funded Jarvi’s research died in committee Friday night.
Ruderman said Jarvi has been doing her work on a shoestring budget for years without state assistance. That needs to change, he said earlier this week.
Parasitologist Deborah Iwanowicz of the National Fish Health Research Laboratory in Kearneysville, W.Va., said her team learned, while researching rat lungworm in Florida, that sampling the rat lungworm carriers — slugs and snails — for the parasite is tricky.
“With most research looking for the presence of the nematode within the snail, a single tissue sample is consistently taken from one area of the snail,” she said by email. “We found that just by increasing the sample collection to two samples, that the prevalence of finding the rat lungworm increased. Therefore, it’s important that researchers sample multiple locations to determine the presence of the rat lungworm, as the larvae are not uniformly distributed within the muscle tissue of the snail.”
Such seemingly simple research techniques are the kind not well-studied because of lack of funding.
Jarvi said research is needed about the various ways rat lungworm gets transmitted, diagnosis and counting cases, what vectors might carry the parasite, ways to stop the parasite, ways to control rats and snails/slugs, long-term effects of the disease, the right size of filters for water-catchment systems, how UV light affects the parasite, symptomless human cases, whether crabs, lizards and coquis carry rat lungworm parasites, and the best medical therapies and when to administer those therapies.
If the state Legislature had come through with research funding, Jarvi said, her team was ready to “kick into gear and get some of these studies.”
Jarvi is thankful attention is being paid to the problem but isn’t sure how to fund the extensive research that’s needed.
“We deworm our dogs. Our horses. Why not deworm rats?” Jarvi said. But that will take research, too.
Email Jeff Hansel at jhansel@hawaiitribune-herald.com.
