Belinda Smith
speaker
2,605 appearances
27 recordings
4 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 3d ago
Belinda Smith’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 27 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 6.
Appearances
So when she releases those eggs, they're released into the lumen of the bowel and they come out in the faeces.
And an infected person in a developing country, if they don't use a toilet, if they defecate in the environment, which is still quite common in a lot of rural areas, then the eggs that come out in the faeces will...
embryonate, and if it's a warm, humid environment, eggs will hatch and the little larvae inside will burrow around in the soil for a while, eat the bacteria, undergo a couple of molting cycles like an insect, cast off their outer sheath, get a little bit bigger, and they do that twice, and that's the stage that then is ready to encounter human skin.
So if someone sits on the ground where these larvae are hanging around or if they walk barefoot,
that brief encounter is enough for the worms to grab hold of the skin and start burrowing through.
And that often goes unnoticed.
Or when I got infected, and when our volunteers in clinical trials get infected, they experience intense itchiness.
It's not pain, it's just intensely itchy.
And then once those larvae have gotten into the skin, they find the nearest blood vessel.
They get into that blood vessel, actively penetrating through into the blood vessel.
And then they're passively swept with the blood circulation through the lungs or through the heart and into the lungs.
And once they're in the lungs, something tells them they've arrived in the lungs.
And then they break out of the blood vessels in the lungs into the alveolar spaces, the air sacs, and they creep, actively creep all the way up your windpipe.
and then you cough and swallow them, and that's how they reach the gut.
So it's the most tortuous of life cycles, but it's predictable.
They don't go wandering off into the central nervous system or other tissues, which is why we have no problem getting ethical approval from our ethics committees to do these clinical trials.
Sure, but the whole trial is about the fact that they managed to survive in the human body by secreting something, as you said, through the mouth or whatever it is, that's stabilising the human body and the inflammation goes away.
Yeah.
So we've evolved with these, Robin, over millennia.
When vertebrates crawled out of the swamps, we had worms on board.
Showing 2421–2440 of 2,605 · page 122 of 131
← Previous
Next →