One way to get rid of a parasite—an organism that lives on or in a different species—is to destroy the host, as in killing mosquitoes to eliminate the malaria parasite within it. This approach is not desirable when the host is us.

But in the current era of genomic medicine, we are gaining new, elegant, and, as researchers like to say, “rational” ways of dealing with parasitic disease. Such methods, based on knowledge of the structure and functioning of the parasitic organism at the molecular level, involve figuring out its vulnerabilities and designing drugs to target them directly.

At the University of Georgia, researchers in the Center for Tropical and Emerging Global Diseases (CTEGD) are employing that rationale to understand a number of different parasites, some of which cause disease and death worldwide. And one that is piquing considerable interest is Cryptosporidium, which gives people long and uncomfortable bouts of diarrhea, sometimes even killing particularly vulnerable individuals.