Global health advances against malaria

Malaria is a major global health concern, threatening about half the world's population, and killing 1 million people each year, mainly children in sub-Saharan Africa.

Global health efforts at control, prevention and eradication are ongoing, and include a couple of potential advances announced this week.

Researchers have discovered a novel way to "vaccinate" against the disease's deadly complications. Malaria parasites begin their infective cycle by invading the human liver before rapidly replicating and entering the blood stream. It is during their blood stream phase that they cause the acute symptoms and deadly complications that are a hallmark of infection. By administering preventive antibiotics concurrent with intentional malaria infection, researchers were able to mutate the parasites during their liver phase and prevent the more harmful blood stream phase. The global health research team, a collaboration of the London School of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, Heidelberg University School of Medicine, the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology, and the Kenyan-based KEMRI-Wellcome Trust Research Programme, are hoping their breakthrough will lead to "needless-vaccination" against malaria.

Publishing giant Elsevier, meanwhile, unveiled www.malarianexus.com, a dedicated website for distributing malaria-related research. The site gathers together featured articles, journals, news, and other resources dedicated to malaria research. While potentially streamlining your search for the latest global health research related to malaria, the site also appears to function as a marketing portal for Elsevier-published content. None of the top five "top downloaded" studies were available for free, so you'd either have to go to a medical library or pay about $30 per paper to read them.