Onchocerciasis
human helminthiasis
Onchocerciasis, also known as river blindness, is a disease caused by infection with the parasitic worm Onchocerca volvulus. Symptoms include severe itching, bumps under the skin, and blindness. It is the second-most common cause of blindness due to infection, after trachoma.
The parasitic worm is spread by the bites of a black fly of the Simulium genus. Usually, many bites are required before infection occurs. These flies live near rivers, hence the common name of the disease, river blindness. Once inside a person, the worms create larvae that make their way out to the skin, where they can infect the next black fly that bites the person. There are a number of ways to make the diagnosis, including placing a biopsy of the skin in normal saline and watching for the larva to come out, looking in the eye for larvae, and looking within the bumps under the skin for adult worms.
A vaccine against the disease does not exist. Prevention is by avoiding being bitten by flies.
The public source identifies “Onchocerciasis” as human helminthiasis. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Onchocerciasis, human and helminthiasis.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1137321. The Library of Congress control number is sh85094719. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank.
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This entry incorporates text from “Onchocerciasis” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.