As the third-most lethal cancer in the United States, with only a 1% five-year survival rate for people with its most aggressive form, pancreatic cancer has long been a target of researchers who search for ways to slow or ...
23 hours ago
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Antibodies have drawn a spotlight over the past year and a half as scientists and lay people alike have asked how long the infection-fighting proteins persist in the face of a formidable enemy—a pandemic virus that has ...
Advanced technologies have been used to solve a long-standing mystery about why some people develop serious illness when they are infected with the malaria parasite, while others carry the infection asymptomatically.
Jul 23, 2021
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A large international team of researchers has found a small molecule compound that has proven to be effective in treating malaria in mice. In their paper published in the journal Science Translational Medicine, the group ...
The parasites that cause severe malaria are well-known for the sinister ways they infect humans, but new research may lead to drugs that could block one of their most reliable weapons: interference with the immune response.
Jul 21, 2021
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Two U.S. Phase 1 clinical trials of a novel candidate malaria vaccine have found that the regimen conferred unprecedentedly high levels of durable protection when volunteers were later exposed to disease-causing malaria parasites. ...
Jun 30, 2021
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Six antibody characteristics could help scientists identify which pregnant women are at risk of placental malaria infections, finds a study published today in eLife.
Jun 29, 2021
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A rare parasitic infection imported from Europe continues to take root in Alberta, Canada. The province is now the North American hotspot for human alveolar echinococcosis (AE), which takes the form of a growth in the liver, ...
Jun 18, 2021
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A faster method for collecting pure malaria parasites from infected mosquitos could accelerate the development of new, more potent malaria vaccines.
Jun 17, 2021
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The role of people infected with malaria without showing symptoms presents a hidden risk to efforts to control the disease after they were found to be responsible for most infections in mosquitoes, according to a study published ...
Jun 17, 2021
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Parasitism is a type of symbiotic relationship between two different organisms where one organism, the parasite, takes favor from the host, sometimes for a prolonged time. In general, parasites are much smaller than their hosts, show a high degree of specialization for their mode of life, and reproduce more quickly and in greater numbers than their hosts. Classic examples of parasitism include interactions between vertebrate hosts and diverse animals such as tapeworms, flukes, the Plasmodium species, and scabs. Parasitism is differentiated from parasitoidism, a relationship in which the host is always killed by the parasite such as moths, butterflies, ants, flies and others.
The harm and benefit in parasitic interactions concern the biological fitness of the organisms involved. Parasites reduce host fitness in many ways, ranging from general or specialized pathology (such as castration), impairment of secondary sex characteristics, to the modification of host behaviour. Parasites increase their fitness by exploiting hosts for food, habitat and dispersal.
Although the concept of parasitism applies unambiguously to many cases in nature, it is best considered part of a continuum of types of interactions between species, rather than an exclusive category. Particular interactions between species may satisfy some but not all parts of the definition. In many cases, it is difficult to demonstrate that the host is harmed. In others, there may be no apparent specialization on the part of the parasite, or the interaction between the organisms may be short-lived. In medicine, only eukaryotic organisms are considered parasites, with the exclusion of bacteria and viruses. Some branches of biology, however, regard members of these groups as parasitic.[citation needed]
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