The world of parasites will be featured in the first Science on Tap seminar of the semester. 

The lecture will be given by William Font, professor emeritus of biology.

The event will be held Tuesday, Feb. 3 for 7 p.m. at Tope Lá Catering, 113 East Thomas St. in Hammond with doors open at 6:30 p.m. The presentation is free and open to all ages. 

The Science on Tap series is a set of seminars given by various professors and researchers found at the university ranging from a wide spectrum of subjects in the science community. The goal of the series is to bring attention and inform the community and students on various areas in the community, in a way, sharing the knowledge.

The title of the presentation is “People, Pets and Parasites” and will be given by Font, who still does research on campus. When he was a professor, one of his responsibilities was a course called medical parasitology, the study of parasites. The main focus of the class is human parasites.

“In parasitology, we usually deal with the protistan parasites, single celled and membrane bound, nucleus-containing organism, as opposed to bacteria and virus,” said Font. “Then, we work with worm parasites and talk about arthropods, which are important, such as ticks, flees and things like that. We talk about parasites found on the surface of the body that serve as vectors of disease, such as ticks, which cause lime disease.”

In his seminar for the series, Font will be discussing various subjects covered in his course but they will all be pertaining to the community in some way.

“The Science on Tap series is for people who are scientists to take what they teach and make it accessible to the general public,” said Font. “What I’m going to do is take the parasites that I talked about in my medical parasitology course and make it understandable by taking out all the jargon.”

Font will also be going over parasites that transmit diseases. An example of this is malaria parasites, which people contract through mosquitoes. Despite it not being present in the United States, this parasite is still a major issue in the world, especially in tropical countries.

“People frequently encounter parasites in their companion animals, so I thought I would add that to the talk,” said Font. “The parasites I’m going to talk about are some that occur globally, some of these occur in topical countries so we don’t have to worry about them here. On the other hand, I’m going to talk about local parasites. People don’t think about it much, but there are still many parasites around that we have to deal with.”

Discussing topics like these, even though they are not a direct problem for the United States, are still important to the country and its citizens. Parasites have the ability to play a large role in economies they do not occur in.

“If you know how parasites are transmitted, you know how to avoid those means of transmissions,” said Font. “Also, it will give people an appreciation of how parasites play a role in this economy. Parasites that don’t occur here still affect us because it causes poverty and misery in the world and that indirectly determines how America reacts to other countries.” 

Font will be discussing various parasite problems more common to the community, such as pinworms and lice, and will be explaining how to prevent and get rid of them. 

The Science on Tap series will be having two more lectures for the spring semesters, which are “What came first, the chicken or the egg? The importance of development” on March 3 and “The Beauty of the Brain” on May 5. For more information on the lecture series, visit the Southeastern Biology Seminar Series Facebook page.