Malaria is a major world health problem. It results from infection of parasites belonging to the genus Plasmodium. Plasmodium falciparum and Plasmodium vivax cause the major human malarias, with P falciparum being the more virulent. During their blood stages of infection, both P falciparum and P vivax induce anemia. Severe malarial anemia caused by P falciparum is responsible for approximately ...

Plasmodium falciparum is a protozoan parasite that, along with its close relatives, causes malaria in humans. The organism is remarkably adaptable, quickly evolving resistance to the measures humans have deployed against it; it took the parasite only a decade to evolve resistance to chloroquine, a preventative agent first introduced in 1947. Newer drugs have fared no better. A major push is cur...

Plasmodium chabaudi malaria parasite organelles are major elements for ion homeostasis and cellular signaling and also target for antimalarial drugs. By using confocal imaging of intraerythrocytic parasites we demonstrated that the dye acridine orange (AO) is accumulated into P. chabaudi subcellular compartments. The AO could be released from the parasite organelles by collapsing the pH gradien...

Neutrophil extracellular traps (NETs), composed primarily of DNA and proteases, are released from activated neutrophils and contribute to the innate immune response by capturing pathogens. Plasmodium falciparum, the causative agent of severe malaria, thrives in its host by counteracting immune elimination. Here, we report the discovery of a novel virulence factor of P. falciparum, a TatD-like D...

A new, rapid assay, based on a single-round, multiplex PCR, can be used to detect Plasmodium falciparum, P. vivax, P. malariae or P. ovale in human blood. The PCR, which targets the conserved 18S small-subunit RNA genes of the parasites, not only permits a malarial infection to be detected but also allows each Plasmodium species present to be identified, even in cases of mixed infection.

fever were met with attending the Dinajpur dispensary, the blood of which was examined for malarial parasites, while on two occasions a number of chronic fevers in the most feverish part of the district were examined by means of spleen puncture for the recently described parasite-like bodies found last year in chronic fevers lay Leishman and Donovan, and more recently in a casg from Sylhet by M...

it summarises the author's long experience of malaria in India and in the tropics. The illustrations are mostly original and are particularly clear and well executed. Chapter I surveys the general life history of the malarial parasites and the mode of spread of malaria. Chapter II deals with the factors concerned in the spread of malaria: and brings out the important point that " even one infected

The phylogenetic relationships among hemosporidian parasites, including the origin of Plasmodium falciparum, the most virulent malaria parasite of humans, have been heavily debated for decades. Studies based on multiple-gene sequences have helped settle many of these controversial phylogenetic issues. However, denser taxon sampling and genome-wide analyses are needed to confidently resolve the ...

Malaria is a location-specific, dynamic infectious disease transmitted by mosquitoes to humans and is influenced by environmental, vector, parasite, and host factors. The principal purposes of malarial epidemiology are 1) to describe the malarial distribution in space and time along with the physical, biologic, and social etiologic factors and 2) to guide control objectives for either modeling ...

Continual exposure of malarial parasite populations to different drugs may have selected not only for resistance to individual drugs but also for genetic traits that favor initiation of resistance to novel unrelated antimalarials. To test this hypothesis, different Plasmodium falciparum clones having varying numbers of preexisting resistance mechanisms were treated with two new antimalarial age...