A pinch in the leg, a squeal and a trickle of tears. One baby after another in Malawi is getting the first and only vaccine against malaria, one of history's deadliest and most stubborn of diseases.
Jan 16, 2020
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Parasites in the genus Plasmodium, which cause malaria, are transmitted to humans through bites from infected mosquitoes. The parasites acclimatize to these two completely different hosts because the plasticity of their genome ...
Jan 03, 2020
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Humans have long been thwarted by 'the fever'. References to malaria's infamous febricity are found across antiquity, from writings by the four thousand-year-old Vedic sages of ancient India to the Greek physician Hippocrates. ...
Dec 19, 2019
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Australian researchers have found a new drug target for stopping the spread of malaria, after successfully blocking the world's deadliest malaria parasite—Plasmodium falciparum—from completing the 'transmission stage' ...
Dec 17, 2019
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Is it safe to give ivermectin to pregnant women? In order to answer this question, researchers from the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), an institution supported by "la Caixa," conducted a systematic review ...
Dec 12, 2019
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Malaria parasites are rapidly developing resistance to front-line drugs across the world, threatening to undo years of progress in reducing deaths from the disease.
Nov 27, 2019
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The World Health Organization has set a goal to eliminate river blindness, a neglected tropical disease found mostly in African villages near fast-flowing rivers and streams, by 2030. Spread by bites from black flies that ...
Nov 26, 2019
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Some traditional vegetable and meat soup broths can interrupt the life cycle of the most deadly of the malarial parasites, Plasmodium falciparum, reveal the results of lab tests, in what is thought to be the first study of ...
Nov 18, 2019
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A parasite is an organism that lives in or on an organism of another species.
Nov 18, 2019
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Researchers have narrowed down the malaria proteins and disease-fighting antibodies that could be used to develop a vaccine against the most severe forms of malaria.
Nov 13, 2019
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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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