Scientists artificially infect mosquitoes with human malaria to advance treatment
A vector refers to an organism that carries and transmits an infectious disease, as mosquitoes do malaria.
Jan 14, 2021
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A vector refers to an organism that carries and transmits an infectious disease, as mosquitoes do malaria.
Jan 14, 2021
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The levels of small molecules called microRNAs (miRNAs) circulating in blood could help identify early on children with life-threatening forms of malaria, according to a study led by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health, ...
Jan 13, 2021
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Despite being easy and inexpensive to treat, a group of common bacterial and parasitic infections kill hundreds of thousands of people in tropical countries each year. In a new paper, Yale SOM's Teresa Chahine and her co-authors ...
Jan 12, 2021
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In the ongoing arms race between humans and the parasite that causes malaria, Taane Clark and colleagues at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) report that new mutations that enhance resistance to a ...
Dec 31, 2020
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Multiple bouts of blood feeding by mosquitoes shorten the incubation period for malaria parasites and increase malaria transmission potential, according to a study published December 31 in the open-access journal PLOS Pathogens ...
Dec 31, 2020
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To effectively combat an infection, the body first has to sense it's been invaded, then the affected tissue must send out signals to corral resources to fight the intruder. Knowing more about these early stages of pathogen ...
Dec 28, 2020
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According to the results of research led by the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM), one the various strategies deployed by the Leishmania parasite to avoid triggering the human immune system is to activate the SHP-1 protein.
Dec 11, 2020
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Malaria researchers, working in an area of Uganda where infections have been dropping dramatically, discovered a small number of infected but asymptomatic school-age children can serve as stealth "super spreaders" responsible ...
Nov 18, 2020
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De'Broski Herbert has a philosophy that's guided his career researching helminths, or parasitic worms, and their interaction with their hosts' immune systems: "Follow the worm."
Nov 13, 2020
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A new rapid diagnostic test that can differentiate between different strains of Chagas disease parasite could lead to a widespread testing program.
Nov 12, 2020
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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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