Parasitic cysts in stool sample?

[Pit]

Hi all,
It's kind of disgusting question, but I hope someone will be able to help me here

Anyway here's the story; I had this yellow colored extra smelly stool for the past 5 days and decided to examine it. So I made some pictures of what looks like cysts.
My question is whom they belong to? Before examining with the microscope I suspected G.lamblia, due to the characteristic yellow stool (Steatorrhea), but those cysts don't look like of G.lamblia..So my guess is that they belong to Cyclospora cayetanensis.

P.S: all pictures were mad with X40 magnification (eyepiece X8).

Thanx for the help!

[Tom Jones]

Pit,

According to Wiki, this morning's goto parasit reference: " Morphologically speaking, C. cayetanensis has spherical oocysts that are between 7.5 and 10 micrometers in diameter..."

That makes them slightly larger than a normal human red blood cell (~7 microns).

So, at 40x, unless those photos are dramatically cropped, those things are way too big. You don't happen to have a calibrated eyepiece micrometer you could check the size with, do you? In parasitology, among other things, size matters. A lot.

Read the rest of the Wiki entry and you'll see it's unlikely you would be able to recover and identify it without resorting to more dramatic methods.

Might I suggest you consult your local physician, get stool specimen containers with the proper preservatives, follow the recommended protocols (usually three specimens over three days, one per day) and send them off to a clinical lab that does that stuff for a living. Parasitology can be pretty difficult even with the proper training and lots of experience.

Unless you've already done that, in which case have at it!

Tom