20 for 20: Day 2: The deal with Joyeuxiella

While flipping through the Bayer manual of  Helminthology in Veterinary Practice by Pachnicke et al., which has some very pretty parasite pictures, I came across the cestode Joyeuxiella. The name has connotations of a happy parasite, but was named after the French  veterinary parasitologist, Dr. Joyeux.

As I rooted around the internet and the books to learn about this parasite, I saw that besides being infected by the Cylophylideans, Taeniids, Mesocestoides and Dipylidium caninum, cats in other parts of the world except the Americas, can also be infected by two other genera in the Family Dipylidiidae, viz. Diplopylidium and Joyeuxiella. The latter two are very similar to Dipylidium in shape and size, except for the placement of genital apertures and egg morphology. Dr. Bowman’s book says that while the genital aperture is slightly behind the middle of the segment in Dipylidium, it lies anterior to the middle of the segment in Diplopylidium and Joyeuxiella. Also, while 5- 30 eggs are commonly observed in egg packets of Dipylidium, only one egg per egg packet occurs with Joyeuxiella and Diplopylidium.

Joyeuxiella uses coprophagous bettles as the first intermediate host, and reptiles and small mammals as second intermediate hosts. Cats and dogs can be definitive hosts. The genus was revised in 1983 (1) , and shrunk from 13 species to 3 valid species namely J. pasqualei, J. fuhrmanni and J. echinorhyncoides. The paper also presents the key to species identification in the genus.

Literature about Joyeuxiella is scant, and a search on PubMed brought up only 28 articles, of which 4 had been published between 2012 and 2017, and 14 between 2007 and 2017. An interesting older article published in 2006 was a feline case reported from Thessaloniki in Greece of intestinal pleating associated with J. pasqualei infection (2). The tapeworm had attached itself to the anterior parts of the small intestine, explaining the clinical signs associated with a linear foreign body. Geographically, incidence seems to cluster around the middle east, parts of Europe and Australia. In a study from Dubai (3), rather a large percentage (65.8%) of the cats trapped and euthanized seemed to be infected with Joyeuxiella species. In another study from Spain, feral cats were considered reservoirs of infection to Iberian lynxs (4).

Although the parasite seems absent in North and South America, it behooves Veterinary Parasitologists to be on the lookout, lest the parasite becomes established here, in yet another case of parasites taking to the skies and arriving in locations where they were not initially a problem.

References:
1 Jones, Arlene. "A revision of the cestode genus Joyeuxiella Fuhrmann, 1935 (Dilepididae: Dipylidiinae)." Systematic Parasitology 5.3 (1983): 203-213.
2 Papazoglou, L. G., et al. "Intestinal pleating associated with Joyeuxiella pasqualei infection in a cat." Veterinary record 159.19 (2006): 634.
3Schuster, Rolf K., et al. "The parasite fauna of stray domestic cats (Felis catus) in Dubai, United Arab Emirates." Parasitology research 105.1 (2009): 125.
4 Bowman, Dwight D. Georgis' Parasitology for Veterinarians. Elsevier Health Sciences, 2014.

This post is part of a goal to write for 20 mins for 20 days.