Malaria News |
Mosquitoes: first evaluate impacts of eradicating them 
We may find ways to limit or even eradicate certain groups of mosquitoes, and it is wise to evaluate the consequences in advance (Nature 466, 432-434; 2010).
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Branched tricarboxylic acid metabolism in Plasmodium falciparum
A central hub of carbon metabolism is the tricarboxylic acid cycle, which serves to connect the processes of glycolysis, gluconeogenesis, respiration, amino acid synthesis and other biosynthetic pathways. The protozoan intracellular malaria parasites (Plasmodium spp.), however, have long been suspected of possessing a significantly streamlined carbon metabolic network in which tricarboxylic acid metabolism plays a minor role. Blood-stage Plasmodium parasites rely almost entirely on glucose fermentation for energy and consume minimal amounts of oxygen, yet the parasite genome encodes all of the enzymes necessary for a complete tricarboxylic acid cycle,
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Metabolism: Malaria parasite stands out
One of the hallmarks of cellular biochemistry is the ability to extract energy efficiently from available substrates. The malaria parasite, however, deviates from the norm, and has come up with its own solution.
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Demand for malaria drug soars
From bust to boom to bust again: artemisinin, the key ingredient of front-line antimalarial drugs, is entering the third chapter of its turbulent history. A decade ago, the compound -' available only from the sweet wormwood plant Artemisia annua -' was scarce and expensive. But by 2007, the market was wallowing in a surfeit of the drug as farmers flocked to grow the crop. Now, as a US$343-million initiative starts to battle malaria through hugely subsidized medicines, suppliers are again worried that there will not be enough artemisinin to go around, while farmers, plant breeders and synthetic biologists are hoping that they can snap the drug out of its roller-coaster supply cycle.
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Ecology: A world without mosquitoes
Every day, Jittawadee Murphy unlocks a hot, padlocked room at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Silver Spring, Maryland, to a swarm of malaria-carrying mosquitoes (Anopheles stephensi). She gives millions of larvae a diet of ground-up fish food, and offers the gravid females blood to suck from the bellies of unconscious mice -' they drain 24 of the rodents a month. Murphy has been studying mosquitoes for 20 years, working on ways to limit the spread of the parasites they carry. Still, she says, she would rather they were wiped off the Earth.
So what would happen if there were none? Would anyone or anything miss them? Nature put this question to scientists who explore aspects of mosquito biology and ecology, and unearthed some surprising answers.
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Who controls malaria control?
Awa-Marie Coll-Seck enjoys a hard-hitting history of malaria, but takes issue with its contention that current eradication strategies are repeating the errors of the past. Today, malaria is preventable and curable. Yet it kills nearly a million people a year and remains a threat to 40% of the global population. In The Fever, journalist Sonia Shah makes sense of the multifaceted history of this harrowing disease and our response to it.
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Drug discovery: Pulled from a protein's embrace
It is hard to predict how strongly a small molecule will bind to a protein, but this is a crucial goal of computer-aided drug discovery. A new approach models the forcible removal of molecules from a protein's active site.
Most drugs are small ligand molecules that bind to a protein. Some disrupt protein-'protein interactions, whereas many others -' enzyme inhibitors -' inhibit reactions carried out by proteins.
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Climate change and the global malaria recession
The current and potential future impact of climate change on malaria is of major public health interest. The proposed effects of rising global temperatures on the future spread and intensification of the disease, and on existing malaria morbidity and mortality rates3, substantively influence global health policy. The contemporary spatial limits of Plasmodium falciparum malaria and its endemicity within this range, when compared with comparable historical maps, offer unique insights into the changing global epidemiology of malaria over the last century. It has long been known that the range of malaria has contracted through a century of economic development and disease control. Here, for the first time, we quantify this contraction and the global decreases in malaria endemicity since approximately 1900. We compare the magnitude of these changes to the size of effects on malaria endemicity proposed under future climate scenarios and associated with widely used public health interventions. Our findings have two key and often ignored implications with respect to climate change and malaria. First, widespread claims that rising mean temperatures have already led to increases in worldwide malaria morbidity and mortality are largely at odds with observed decreasing global trends in both its endemicity and geographic extent. Second, the proposed future effects of rising temperatures on endemicity are at least one order of magnitude smaller than changes observed since about 1900 and up to two orders of magnitude smaller than those that can be achieved by the effective scale-up of key control measures. Predictions of an intensification of malaria in a warmer world, based on extrapolated empirical relationships or biological mechanisms, must be set against a context of a century of warming that has seen marked global declines in the disease and a substantial weakening of the global correlation between malaria endemicity and climate.
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