This Month In Blastocystis Research (SEP 2016) - 500,000 PW edition

The Blastocystis Parasite Blog has been going on for about 4 years and 3 months or so. Just now,  the number of pageviews passed 500,000!

I want to thank everyone who has browsed my page. I hope that I have been able to contribute to bringing on a couple of topics for debate and stimulate research into Blastocystis - maybe other parasites too. The FB community is quite active in terms of referring to my website, and so I extend a big Thank You to this community also.

I won't be doing a regular post this time - just hope that some of you will take to (re)visiting one or more of the 174 posts I've developed so far.

I know that I am not replying to all the emails I get; please try again... there are times when I don't really get to check my blog email... but every now and then I do, and I might stumble upon your query... I tend not to reply to those that deal exclusively with questions on how to eradicate Blastocystis. If you are curious about this and my personal opinion on it, please look up posts on "treatment" (you can see the labels in the right side bar).

Please also note that this blog has a FB page.

Thank you for stopping by and for contributing to the debate on Blastocystis.

Blastocystis Parasite Blog - 2 Years Anniversary!

Today marks the 2 Years Anniversary of the Blastocytis Parasite Blog! And tomorrow my daughter will be turning three, so there is plenty of reason to celebrate!

My 'Birthday Special' is a collection of links to blog posts that are among the most popular or most unusual ones; a couple of them have been slightly edited (typos and updates).

But before that just a couple of announcements:
A colleague of mine will be at the Digestive Diasese Week in Chicago from 3-6 May 2014 presenting an abstract with the title: 'Dientamoeba fragilis and Blastocytis - two parasites associated with gastrointestinal health'. The title may have a harsh connotation to some, but soon I will be posting the abstract here on the blog, and you will understand why we chose this title.

Next, I'd like to encourage colleagues to come up with suggestions for topics and guest bloggers.

Soon, I'll be doing a separate post on tools available for students/researchers to detect and characterise Blastocystis in samples from humans and animals.

That's it for now; here are the links!

1. The Circular Problem of Blastocystis
2. Amelioration of Colitis by Parasites - or "An Elliot & Weinstock Special"
3. Do IBS Patients Lack Blastocystis and Dientamoeba??
4. Micro-Eukaryotic Diversity in The Human Instestine
5. Blastocystis aux Enfers

Blastocystis Parasite Blog Hits Pageview #100,000!

I want to thank all the readers of this blog who all contribute to an increasing traffic across the site. I reckon I have between 200-400 pageviews daily, and the blog has now reached more than 100,000 pageviews! While I know that quite a few pageviews are fake (i.e. due to bots), it's still great to see visitors from all over the world stopping by, - something that makes my Blasto musings so much more worthwhile.

So, how to celebrate? Well, I've got some pretty cool announcements:

For instance, I can tell you that there is a brand new review out by Dr Pauline D. Scanlan (University of Cork) and myself in Trends in Parasitology (November issue) with some suggestions for shifts in paradigms, and it should be free for download throughout all of November! I hope that you'll enjoy it.

There's also a review out by Wawrzyniak and colleagues (members of the French group who published the first Blastocystis genome) in Therapeutic Advances in Infectious Disease available free for download here.

Congress-wise, I'm happy to announce that I've been invited to the ASM conference in Boston in May 2014 (there goes my Copenhagen Marathon dream for next year!) to give a talk at the special Parasitology Symposium with the title 'Blastocystis - clinical relevance: more common and important than you think'. Moreover, the ICOPA conference in August 2014 in Mexico City will host a symposium and a workshop on 'Blastocystis Barcoding'; more on this and the speakers included in the symposium later. Maybe I'll see you there?