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Fleas
Bloodsucking fleas are common in the moist areas of Pusapom where most humans also live. The most dangerous species, tiplabwae, is also the Poswa word for fleas in general. This flea inflicts a painful bite, usually to the calves or thighs, but can be quickly brushed off by a human. It is not the bite but the viral disease carried by many tiplabwae fleas that is responsible for human fatalities. This disease is called mumu sasa and is characterized by opportunistic infections similar to those found in HIV infection.
(Note: this is the same disease I mentioned on the first page, but I've changed the vector from flies to fleas. This means that the disease can be avoided by avoiding the other animals that the fleas prey on.)
Parasitic worms
Poswobs have more to fear from worms than germs. The plabas is a hookworm that lives in moist soil and can enter the human body after reaching exposed skin. It is most commonly encountered in gardens where the soil has been recently disturbed.
Inside the body, the plabas worm migrates to the small intestine and feeds on blood and undigested nutrients from the host's diet. The worm lays eggs which adhere to the walls of the intestine and hatch into larvae called bamblambum. Shortly after birth, the bamblambum bite through the intestine and begin eating their way through the tissues of the body, growing in size as they digest the tissues and organs of the host body. After this journey they break through the skin, usually on the legs or feet of the host, and exit the body to begin the free-living stage of their life cycle.
Here, the plabas worms seek out growing vegetables, particularly those that grow mostly or entirely underground. During this stage of their life they feed on the vegetables, and after molting, they crawl up to the surface in order to seek out a new human host to invade.
Triactinomyxons
The pwep is a triactinomyxon that lives in salt water and spends most of its lifecycle in the body of a bottom-dwelling predatory lamprey. Infected lampreys periodically expel tiny, free-floating pwep spores through their anus into the water. The pwep spores can infect humans who are swimming or walking in the water. The pwep has no sensory organs, and has no preferred host for this stage of their life cycle. Upon encountering exposed human skin, the pwep rapidly enters the body, causing extreme pain to the host. Once inside the body, the triactinomyxon reproduces asexually and the newly formed spores seek out muscle tissue on which to feed. The spores that grow inside the human are even smaller than the type that originally infected the human, but are capable of rapid growth. The spores feed on muscle tissue and expel their waste products into the human host's bloodstream.
The next step in the triactinomyxon's life stage occurs when the infected human host is bitten by a lamprey. For the parasite to infect the lamprey, the lamprey's bite must reach deep into muscle tissue containing the triactinomyxons' spores.
Transmission of the parasite is therefore most likely if a lamprey bites a human who has been weakened by the disease and is too weak to fend off the bite of the lamprey.
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Sunàqʷa the Sea Lamprey says:
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