Introduction Human migration and the presence of natural vectors (mollusks) of Schistosoma mansoni are the primary causes of the expansion of mansoni schistosomiasis into southern areas of South America. Water conditions are favorable for the expansion of this disease because of the extensive hydrographic network, which includes the basins of the Paraná and Uruguay rivers and favors mollusk reproduction. These rivers also aid agriculture and tourism in the area. Despite these favorable conditions, natural infection by S. mansoni has not yet been reported in Argentina, Uruguay, or Paraguay. Methods Two species of planorbid from Argentina, Biomphalaria straminea and B. tenagophila, were exposed to the miracidia of five Brazilian strains of S. mansoni. Results Biomphalaria tenagophila (Atalaya, Buenos Aires province) was infected with the SJS strain (infection rate 3.3%), confirming the experimental susceptibility of this Argentinian species. Biomphalaria straminea (Rio Santa Lucía, Corrientes province) was susceptible to two Brazilian strains: SJS (infection rate 6.7%) and Sergipe (infection rate 6.7%). Conclusions These results demonstrate that species from Argentina have the potential to be natural hosts of S. mansoni and that the appearance of foci of mansoni schistosomiasis in Argentina is possible.

This paper presents a framework for the creation of transport protocols for mobile hosts that use multiple link layers simultaneously for the same connection. This abstraction provides an end-to-end transport layer channel between two applications that do not have to be aware of host mobility. The channel is composed of multiple network layer sub-channels. A sub-channel is an end-to-end network layer connection that is mapped to one physical interface. Inverse multiplexing is used at the transport level to divide application data into sub-channels, and a rate-based transmission mechanism provides congestion avoidance. The same mechanism is used to differentiate transmission losses from congestion losses, resulting in good throughput in lossy wireless links. Experimental results for two protocols created using this framework validate our design choices.