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June 26, 2002

U.S. IMMUNIZATION NEWS

"Malaria Makes Comeback While Scientists Unravel Genetic Threads They Hope Lead to Better Drugs or Vaccine" Associated Press (www.ap.org) (06/24/02); Callahan, Rick

An ancient disease, malaria continues to defy modern predictions of its demise and even appears to be rebounding substantially in the developing world.  Scientists say that the most deadly of the four human-infecting malaria parasites, Plasmodium falciparum, is becoming more resistant to choloroquine, the first and cheapest line of defense against the disease.  Furthermore, there is evidence that the parasite is spreading into other regions, even re-emerging in places where it had been previously eradicated. The World Health Organization reports that at least 1.5 million to 2.7 million people die from malaria annually and at least 90 percent of those deaths are people who live in sub-Saharan Africa, where the disease is helped along by horrendous poverty and malnutrition.  Once the parasite, carried by mosquitoes, hits the human bloodstream, it travels to the liver to mature and multiply, a process that takes just a few days; then the parasites return to the blood and systematically begin to shatter cells, shutting down the immune system.

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