Wednesday, April 29, 2009

New way 'to starve out malaria

Good morning friends. I want to share with you what I have read about the malaria. With reference to Indian Express there are new way to starve out malaria.

It has been discovered by some researchers a way to starve out malaria parasites by targeting a digestive enzyme that the disease needs to feed on blood cells, a major breakthrough in the global fight against malaria which claims the life of a child across the world "every 30 seconds".

An international team has been able to deactivate the final stage of the malaria parasite's digestive machinery, effectively starving the parasite of nutrients and disabling its survival mechanism. And, this process of starvation leads to the death of the parasite.

The results had laid the scientific groundwork to further develop a "specific class" of drugs to treat the disease that's contracted by half-a-billion people and causes around one million deaths a year worldwide.

A single bite from an infected mosquito transfers the malaria parasite into a human's blood stream. "The malaria parasite must then break down blood proteins in order to obtain nutrients. Malaria carries out the first stages of digestion inside a specialized compartment called the digestive vacuole – this can be considered to be like a stomach.

The enzyme (known as PfA-M1), which is essential for parasite viability, is located outside the digestive vacuole meaning it is easier to target from a drug perspective.
About forty per cent of the world's population are at risk of contracting malaria. It is only early days but this discovery could one day provide treatment for some of those 2.5 billion people across the globe."

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