Filtering by
- Creators: Arizona Board of Regents
Many authors have written about the social and economic risk factors such as poverty, low educational attainment, and discrimination that contribute to global indigenous-nonindigenous disparity. In this work, we consider an additional immunological risk factor — T-helper 2 dominance — that appears to exacerbate the effects of social and economic factors on infectious disease outcomes in tropical zones. To this end, a critical review approach was used to extract published data on total serum IgE — an indicator of T-helper 2 dominance. We found a three-orders-of-magnitude differences in total serum IgE across climate zones (tropical vs. temperate), ecologies within the tropics (forests vs. urban/rural), and clinical conditions (HIGE, TPE, ABAP vs. atopy, and helminthiasis). Additionally, that the highest ever reported total serum IgE levels are reported for tropical regions - mainly, healthy members of forest-dwelling indigenous groups of South America, and patients diagnosed with clinical conditions such as onchocerciasis, tropical pulmonary eosinophilia, and hyper-IgE.
Human Papillomavirus, or HPV, is a viral pathogen that most commonly spreads through sexual contact. HPV strains 6 and 11 normally cause genital warts, while HPV strains 16 and 18 commonly cause cervical cancer, which causes cancerous cells to spread in the cervix. Physicians can detect those HPV strains, using a Pap smear, which is a diagnostic test that collects cells from the female cervix.