42 Curated List of Host-Parasite Information and Databases

Museums and Collections

1. Biological Collections of Oswaldo Cruz Institute in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil – Scientific institution with the largest helminth collection in Latin America with nearly 40,000 specimens. The institute also houses several other open-access catalogues of protozoa and medically important vector species.
2. Invertebrates Collection of the Swedish Museum of Natural History – Swedish Museum with collection of >10,000 flatworms, >2,000 nematodes, and select other parasite groups. Accessible through GBIF.
3. Meguro Parasite Museum – Museum in Tokyo, Japan focused on human parasites with over 60,000 specimens. Data is not digitized, though the museum’s founder, Dr. S. Yamaguti, described many of the specimens in 10 volumes of Systema Helminthum. Collections primarily from Japan, Indonesia and Hawaii.
4. Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle (MNHN – Paris) – Helminth collection with more than 30,000 occurences of helminths with particular focus in tropical regions. Accessible through GBIF.
5. Museum of Southwestern Biology, Division of Parasites – Specimen collection of parasites amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals. Particular focus on parasites of small mammals in high altidude locations and Sevilleta Long Term Ecological Research Station in New Mexico, and parasites of seabirds in the artic and Antartica. Accessible through Arctos.
6. The International Outbreak Museum – Museum focused on human food-borne outbreaks, with each exhibit being a different historical outbreak. Part of The Northwest Center for Foodborne Outbreak Management, Epidemiology, and Surveillance.
7. U.S. National Parasite Collection – Specimen collection maintained by USDA that focuses on agriculturally important helminths and protozoans from North America. Accessible through Arctos.

Citizen Science Projects

1. Garden Wildlife Health – This is a UK collaborative project between the Zoological Society of London (ZSL), the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), Froglife and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) that historically has been running since the 1980’s (previously as Garden Bird Health initiative and Frog Mortality Project). Citizens can submit sickness and mortality reports, as well as animal wildlife samples, for wild birds, amphibians, reptiles, and hedgehogs.
2. Project Monarch Health – A citizen science project running since 2006 to test adult monarch butterflies from the U.S. and Canada for the protozoan parasite Ophryocystis elektroscirrha. Participants submit spore samples collected from adult abdomems with tape for laboratory assessment at University of Georgia.

Reporting Systems

1. Healthmap – A web platform that provides infectious disease outbreak alerts for humans and animals.
2. Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases (ProMed) – An early warning of outbreaks of emerging and re-emerging diseases. Sources of information include media reports, official reports, online summaries, local observers, and others. EIDR-Connect parses ProMed reports into disease outbreak events, curated by disease experts.
3. The Contagion Outbreak Monitor – An interactive map of human bloodborne or foodborne outbreaks in the past two years. Targeted to practitioners and clinicians.
4. WHISPers – Wildlife Health Information Sharing Partnership event reporting system managed by USGS National Wildlife Health Center. Events of North American wildlife mortality (death) and morbidity (illness) involving five or more individuals are reported.

Taxonomy

1. GBIF Backbone Taxonomy – Aggregation and synonymization of taxonomy for animals, bacteria, protozoa, and viruses that synthesizes 56 taxonomy sources.
2. ICTV – The viral taxonomy authority with excellent archives and open reports.
3. IUCN Redlist – Online database that provides taxonomic information for wild hosts. You can use the R package and the API to access the data directly.
4. NCBI Taxonomy – The Taxonomy Database is a curated classification and nomenclature for all of the organisms in the public sequence databases, both parasites and hosts.

Scientific Journals

1. American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene – AJTMH publishes a broad range of papers covering topics in tropical medicine. Their archive is open-access after a 12-month embargo.
2. Annals of Parasitology – Open-access scientific journal of the Polish Parasitological Society, formerly Wiadomości Parazytologiczne, that publishes issues quarterly. Open archives start from 2002.
3. EFSA Journal – Open-access journal of the European Food Safety Authority with yearly reports of food-borne outbreaks and cases of zoonotic agents and antibiotic resistance emergence in humans and animals.
4. Emerging Infectious Diseases – The CDC open-access journal.
5. Journal of the Egyptian Society of Parasitology – Open-access (2013 – present) scientific journal of The Eyptian Society of Parasitology. Published since the 1970s, their archive is indexed in Pub-Med since 1972 (Index Medicus ISSN: 0253-5890).
6. Journal of Wildlife Diseases – JWD provides many open-access articles on new parasite expansions or discoveries.
7. Mitteilungen der Österreichischen Gesellschaft für Tropenmedizin und Parasitologie – 23 open access volumes (1971-2001) of the scientific journal of the Austrian Society for Tropical Medicine and Parasitology.
8. Parasite – Open access journal associated with the Société Française de Parasitologie. Focuses on both animal and human parasites.
9. Parasitologia Hungarica – 31 open-access volumes (1960-1998) of Parasitologia Hungarica, a scientific journal hosted by the Hungarian Natural History Museum.