A role for granulomatous inflammation in the transmission of infectious disease: schistosomiasis and tuberculosis

Abstract

The relationship between cell-mediated granulomatous inflammation and transmission of disease in schistosomiasis and tuberculosis has been explored. In 2 experiments involving Schistosoma mansoni-infected normal and T cell-deprived mice, and infected deprived mice that had been variously reconstituted with immune or normal lymphocytes or immune serum, there was a significant positive numerical correlation between mean liver granuloma diameters and faecal egg counts in individual animals. Lymphocytes from donors with recently patent infections were more active than cells from chronically infected or uninfected donors in reconstituting egg excretion rates in deprived recipients, and mesenteric lymph node (MLN) cells were more active than spleen cells. Modulation of granulomatous activity with increasing chronicity of infection in the donors, resulting in a decrease in granuloma size around freshly produced tissue-bound eggs, was paralleled by a waning of the capacity of transferred lymph node cells to reconstitute egg excretion in the recipients. Serum taken from chronically infected donor mice over the same period and transferred to infected deprived recipients became more active in enhancing egg excretion in the recipients as the cell-mediated activity declined. A recent study in Kenya has found that S. mansoni-infected patients with concurrent human immunodefficiency virus (HIV) infection excrete fewer eggs than patients exposed to the same levels of schistosome infection, but who are not HIV-infected, thus indicating that schistosome egg excretion in humans is also immune-dependent. Attention is drawn to an apparently parallel situation in human tuberculosis, another pathogen which induces a cell-mediated granulomatous immune response. Several studies have shown that patients with tuberculosis who are also HIV-seropositive tend to have fewer tubercle bacilli detectable in their saliva than those with tuberculosis, but who are HIV-negative. This discrepancy, associated with differences in lung pathology in HIV-positive patients, suggests that in tuberculosis immune cell-mediated granulomatous inflammation causes the destruction of host tissue in a manner which facilitates onward transmission of the bacterial pathogen.