Bite me
it is estimated that of the 2.5 billion people at risk of contracting malaria today, there are one billion people who are actually carrying malarial parasites. Two million to three million of them die each year. The death toll could rise to eight million a year due to the spread of parasite strains resistant to chloroquine, the most successful anti-malaria drug we know. And yet, the amount of money that is invested in basic research on malaria is 1,000 to 10,000 times less per case than that spent on aids . As medicinal sciences struggle to meet the phenomenal challenge of checking malaria, there is reason for hope from the life sciences.
Sunetra Gupta and colleagues from the department of zoology at the University of Oxford say that resistance to the most severe form of malaria can be acquired very rapidly, perhaps after just a couple of infective episodes ( Nature Medicine , Vol 5, No 3).
Their findings are based on data gathered from four different regions of sub-Saharan Africa, where malaria caused by the parasite Plasmodium falciparum is common. The study meticulously analysed this data with the help of sophisticated statistical techniques. The inputs for the statistical analysis consisted of the incidence of infections, age of victims and the severity of disease as defined by necessary hospitalisation. The researchers decided to find how the risk of getting malaria changes with age and with differing levels of exposure to infection.
Surprisingly, the statistical analysis showed that one or two infections
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