A new study co-authored by Sylvia Becker-Dreps, MD, MPH, member of the Institute for Global Health and Infectious Diseases, as well as the Joan C. and Robert Huntley Professor of Family Medicine and Epidemiology, and Filemón Bucardo, PhD, a senior researcher at UNC-Chapel Hill, offers new insight into how a common intestinal parasite may affect children’s growth in early life.
Published in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases, the study followed children in a Nicaraguan birth cohort through their first three years of life to better understand how often Giardia infections occurred and whether those infections were linked to growth. In a subset of 76 children, investigators tested 2,305 stool samples and found that Giardia was common in the study population.