Humans are negatively affected by parasitic infection. However, recent researches
revealed that to some extent, parasitic infections are advantageous to humans. Parasitic infections
are found to benefit patients of inflammatory bowel disease, diabetes mellitus, autoimmune
disease and allergic disorder. Furthermore, they promoted studies on pathogenesis of these
diseases, and therefore on safe and effective therapeutic strategy.
In addition, by taking the Caenorhabditis elegans as model organism,
researchers have made a breakthrough in the area of life science, including signal transduction, functional genomics and drug screening.