Category: Tropical Diseases

Researchers provide new details about the inner workings of a parasitic worm that causes a tropical disease called schistosomiasis, which leads to itchy skin, fever, chills, muscle aches, and liver disease that, in some cases, can be fatal. The new results may help design drugs or vaccines against the disease. Schistosomiasis, a disease affecting up to 200 million people in Asia, Africa, and South America, is spread by parasitic worms called blood flukes that live in fresh water.

The Innovative Vector Control Consortium (IVCC) has embarked upon the next phase of its initial five year strategy with the launch of the first tranche of funded projects to develop new public health mosquito control products. The three projects, with partners Bayer CropScience and Syngenta, complement established IVCC projects developing improved mosquito control information systems.

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Malaria Research Institute (JHMRI) have identified a sugar in mosquitoes that allows the malaria-causing parasite, Plasmodium falciparum, to attach itself to the mosquito’s gut. Invasion of the midgut cell layer is an essential stage in the parasite’s lifecycle and in the transmission of malaria from mosquitoes to humans.

A global network to monitor drug resistance and guide malaria treatment and prevention policies is being launched.As outlined in a series of articles in the online open access publication, Malaria Journal, the World Antimalarial Resistance Network (WARN) aims to provide a globally co-ordinated effort to tackle the disease, which is estimated to kill between 1 and 2.7 million people every year.

Cholera is an infectious disease caused by a bacterium, the bacillus Vibrio cholerae. In 2004, 101 383 cases, including 95 000 solely for the African continent, and 2 345 deaths were reported to the World Health Organization. Global climate change has for several years been contributing greatly to the spread of cholera through associated increase in the frequency of torrential rain, floods and periods of drought.

The Marburg virus, like its fearsome cousin Ebola, belongs to the Filoviridae family. It carries the name of the German town where it was first detected in 1967, after a mysterious epidemic had hit employees of the Behring laboratory. The workers had been contaminated as they took organ samples from green monkeys imported from Uganda.

HRH The Princess Royal will open the Centenary Conference of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine & Hygiene ‘One Hundred Years of Tropical Medicine: Meeting the Millennium Goals’ at 9am on Thursday 13 September 2007 at the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre in Westminster, London. HRH The Princess Royal is an Honorary Fellow of the Society.

Funded by a $1.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, scientists at Binghamton University, State University of New York, hope to understand how the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum evolved resistance to the once-effective medication chloroquine.”Malaria is responsible for 1-3 million deaths a year, most of whom are children under 5 in sub-Saharan Africa,” said J.

Ivermectin, the standard drug for treating river blindness (onchocerciasis), is causing genetic changes in the parasite that causes the disease, according to a new study by Roger Prichard (McGill University, Canada) and colleagues, published in the open-access journal PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases. These genetic changes have previously been linked with parasites becoming resistant to ivermectin.

By mapping a specialized sensory organ that the malaria mosquito uses to zero in on its human prey, an international team of researchers has taken an important step toward developing new and improved repellants and attractants that can be used to reduce the threat of malaria, generally considered the most prevalent life-threatening disease in the world. The sensory organ is the maxillary palp.