In Brazil malaria is most frequent in the Amazon region, mainly in the Amazonas state, where it is found the most proportion of indigenous people of the whole country. It is remarkable publications about malaria in the Amazon, although information on malaria in indigenous populations is still poorly explored.
Artemether-lumefantrine (AL) is a first-line agent for uncomplicated malaria caused by Plasmodium falciparum. The WHO recommends periodic therapeutic efficacy studies of antimalarial drugs for the detection of malaria parasite drug resistance and to inform national malaria treatment policies. We conducted a therapeutic efficacy study of AL in a high malaria transmission region of northern Zambia from December 2014 to July 2015.
8-aminoquinoline compounds have long been the only therapeutic agents against latent hepatic malaria parasites. These have poor activity against the blood stage plasmodia causing acute malaria and must be used in conjunction with partner blood schizontocidal agents. We examined the impacts of one such agent, chloroquine, upon the activity of primaquine, an 8-aminoquinoline, against hepatic stages of Plasmodium cynomolgi, Plasmodium yoelii, Plasmodium berghei, and Plasmodium falciparum within several ex vivo systems: primary hepatocytes of Macaca fascicularis; primary human hepatocytes; and stably transformed human hepatocarcinoma cell line HepG2.
District Health Information Systems 2 (DHIS2) is used for supporting health information management in 67 countries, including Solomon Islands. However, there have been few published evaluations of the performance of DHIS2-enhanced disease reporting systems, in particular for monitoring infectious diseases such as malaria. The aim of this study was to evaluate DHIS2 supported malaria reporting in Solomon Islands and to develop recommendations for improving the system.
Plasmodium vivax gene regulation remains difficult to study due to the lack of a robust in vitro culture method, low parasite densities in peripheral circulation and asynchronous parasite development. We adapted an RNA-seq protocol "DAFT-seq" to sequence the transcriptome of four P. vivax field isolates that were cultured for a short period ex vivo before using a density gradient for schizont enrichment.
Suriname has accomplished a steep decline in malaria burden, even reaching elimination levels. Plasmodium serology data are not available for Suriname and even extremely scarce within the region, therefore malaria serology testing was introduced, country customized cut-off values were determined and a study was performed to explore the antibody status for Plasmodium falciparum, Plasmodium vivax and Plasmodium malariae.
Children with severe falciparum malaria in malaria-endemic regions are predisposed to developing life-threatening bacterial co-infection. International guidelines therefore recommend empirical broad-spectrum antibacterial therapy in these children. Few studies have examined co-infection in adults, although it has been believed to be relatively rare; anti-bacterial therapy is therefore not routinely recommended in adults.
A thorough understanding of malaria vector species composition and their bionomic characteristics is crucial to devise effective and efficient vector control interventions to reduce malaria transmission. It has been well documented in Africa that malaria interventions in the past decade have resulted in major changes in species composition from endophilic Anopheles gambiae to exophilic An. arabiensis.
In “Concomitant bacteremia in adults with severe falciparum malaria” in this issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases, 9 of 845 Southeast Asian adults with severe malaria (1%) had bacteremia upon admission, but 4 of those 9 patients (44%) died compared with 108 of 836 (13%) nonbacteremic patients.
Monitoring the genetic structure of pathogen populations may be an economical and sensitive approach to quantify the impact of control on transmission dynamics, highlighting the need for a better understanding of changes in population genetic parameters as transmission declines. Here we describe the first population genetic analysis of the major human malaria parasites, Plasmodium falciparum (Pf) and Plasmodium vivax (Pv) following nationwide distribution of long-lasting insecticide treated nets (LLIN) in Papua New Guinea (PNG).
