India topped countries in the South-East Asia region for the most number of malaria cases and deaths in 2022, according to this report published by the World Health Organization (WHO). Each year, WHO’s World malaria report provides a comprehensive and up-to-date assessment of trends in malaria control and elimination across …
WHILE the Indian government appears to be a lame duck in the face of the recent spurt in malaria in the country, a joint research team of the University of Western Australia and Murdhoch University has developed a new drug capable of killing one of the most virulent forms of …
Peter Smetacek 5,25 a, Jangpura-b New Delhi 110 014 The International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology Post Box 30772 Nairobi, Kenya International Crop Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics Patancheru 502 324 Andhra Pradesh Andrew Thompson Murdoch University Murdoch, wa 6150 Australia
Malaria -- whose incidence dropped from an estimated annual 75 million cases with 0.8 million deaths before Independence to 0.1 million cases with no deaths by 1964 -- showed feverish activity in the '70s. It is stabilising now at about 2 million cases a year. Of late, however, a potentially …
Along with problems associated with unhealthy living conditions and drug resistance, tuberculosis poses an additional danger as it has targeted HIV carriers. As such, TB is a leading cause of death due to a single infectious agent. In the developing world, the annual incidence of all forms of TB is …
Historical ills Malaria It has been hypothesised that the malarial parasite evolved either with humans or even earlier. Hippocrates wrote about it in the 5th century BC. In India, Ayurvedic gurus' Charaka and Susruta related malaria to mosquito bites. For 2,000 years, the Chinese have been using extracts from the …
Right from the "60s, DDT resistance of the malaria parasite host, Anopheles culicifacies, was detected in Gujarat. It was a rising trend. Another important vector, A stephensi, became so rugged that it can now grow in stagnant water found in coolers, used tyres -- just about anywhere. DDT remains the …
Even as the cerebral malaria epidemic in Rajasthan abates with the onset of winter, NGOs who had first sounded the alarm are trying to ensure that the incident does not slip from the state government's memory, till the next outbreak. The Rajasthan Voluntary Health Association (RVHA), with support from the …
JUST as farmers in the dry districts of western Rajasthan were looking forward to a good harvest following the heaviest Irains in 2 decades earlier this year, a deadly disease - cerebral malaria - ran riot through the villages. All hopes of prosperity were dashed as hundreds of people were …
Good news for those down with malaria. Manuel Patarroyo, a biochemist from Colombia, claims that he is about to develop a vaccine against the disease, one of the oldest scourges of mankind. The vaccine is being tested in tropical countries like Tanzania and Thailand. Reports from Tanzania indicate that Patarroyo's …
THE recent outbreak of falciparum malaria in non-endemic areas in Rajasthan has underscored the link between development projects and the damage they cause to the human environment. Public health experts as well as social workers have pointed out that the fuse for the disease's flare-up lay in the well-meant Indira …
DESPITE efforts to prevent the spread of malaria, the disease strikes as many as 300 to 500 million people each year and claims over a million lives. Not only have the mosquitoes that carry the malaria parasite -- Plasmodium -- become increasingly tolerant of pesticides, the parasite"s defence mechanism also …
IN SEPTEMBER 1993, a new strain of cholera got a grip on India. Within a few weeks, the epidemic floated to the shores of Latin America, the bacteria believed to have been smuggled in via the tainted water of large ballast tanks (which are filled with water to give the …
A WELL-KNOWN quasi-ecumenical argument against the existence of God is the existence of the mosquito: apart from being frustratingly acrobatic and musically demented, the little bugger serves no evident purpose at all in the Almighty's scheme of things. Except one which the Lord's herd can do without: over the millennia, …
A CHINESE herb, Artemisia annua, say scientists, has yielded a wonder drug -- artemether -- which is 3 times more effective than quinine in treating malaria that is resistant to most drugs. They have also found that artemisinin, an oil extracted from the plant, has cut to about 1/5th the …
A NEW rapid dipstick method to detect the presence of the malarial parasite, Plasmodium falciparum, could prove a boon to diagnosticians. The test, which has a sensitivity as high as 95 to 100 per cent, has been successfully tried in Kenya and the US (The Lancet, Vol 343, No 8897). …
ARE forests linked with the spread of malaria? Or, for that matter, do terrain, agricultural practices, water-bodies or ground-water have any bearing on the disease? Now, a computer-based analysis technology -- the Geographical Information System (GIS) -- may provide answers to these complex questions. The Malaria Research Centre (MRC) in …
IN WHAT he called "Colombia's gift to the world", immunologist Manuel Patarroyo has handed over all rights to his synthetic malaria vaccine to the World Health Organisation (WHO), a newsletter of the organisation says. The first scientifically accepted field study of the vaccine, reported in March 1993 in the British …
Dense cinchona and silver oak forests covering 3,000 ha in Valparai in the Annamalai hills will be replaced by tea plantations if the state-run Tamil Nadu Plantation Corporation Ltd (TNPCL) has its way. TNPCL was set up in 1976 to rehabilitate Tamil refugees from tea gardens in Sri Lanka. Since …
WITH THEIR earlier attempts to conquer malaria having fallen through, researchers are now toying with a novel approach -- altering the mosquito's genetic make-up so that it cannot carry the parasite it now transmits to humans. Exterminating mosquitoes to check the spread of malaria has been the main goal of …
NEW STRAINS of diarrhoea, malaria and cholera are spreading rapidly in South Asia, adding to the burden of health care systems that are already stretched to breaking point. Scientists in Bangladesh say the new cholera bacterium, named vibrio non-01, has killed as many as 4,000 of 70,000 victims, mostly residents …
