Pictures of Parasites

Parasites are organisms that use a living host for their food source at the expense of that host.  There are a lot of parasites out there - and you've almost certainly been the victim of parasites at some time in your life.  The best example of parasites for most humans are mosquitoes.  Mosquitoes are insects that have a proboscis which they use to penetrate a host and suck out their blood, which the female mosquitoes use for the survival of their larvae.  What's probably the most notable about parasites is that they transmit major human diseases, such as malaria, yellow fever, dengue fever, and breakbone fever, or Chikungunya, which a friend of mine got once. It was ugly.  Point being that mosquitoes, though they don't technically live off of humans, they do require humans to survive as a species, so they qualify as parasites.  The diseases are just the icing on the cake. Also, apparently, if a mosquito is biting you in just the right spot and you flex, they won't be able to get out, and will continue sucking until the burst.  Also, killing mosquitoes is one of the perks to chemotherapy.  "Pull out, Sid, you've hit an artery!"

Tapeworms are another really gross parasite that you'll want to get rid of as soon as you possibly can.  They get into your stomach and work their ways into your intestines, where they basically take your digested food and feed each of their individual segments with it, filling up until the segment at the very end of the tail falls off and comes out of your body through your feces.  This segment is an egg sac, which then spreads to wherever else it goes.  You can get them by eating undercooked food.  You won't feel it so much as you'll poop out tapeworm eggs.  There are drugs that administer painful deaths to the tapeworm.  Take them.

Ticks are another parasite that is particularly gross.  Unlike the mosquitoes, ticks actually drink the blood as their main source of food.  They are technically in the spider family, but unlike spiders who do us a favor by killing mosquitoes, they suck the blood of animals and humans.  Like most parasites, this makes them disease transmitters, and particularly dangerous in the case of transmitting lyme disease.

There are literally hundreds of other types of parasites, but we are not going to get into them, because my desire to inform you is vastly superceded by my queasiness regarding these creatures.  If you get a tick, take it off immediately, but try do so in a way that allows you to get the head out of your skin as well.  If the head stays, it could potentially cause disease, which you don't want to have happen to you.  Any other parasites you need to treat according the the ailment associated with it.  If you catch these dirty rat bastards trying to get to you, swat them kill them do whatever gratifies your urge to destroy them the most.