The malaria parasite has waged a successful guerrilla war against the human immune system for eons, but a study in this week's Journal of Biological Chemistry has exposed one of the tricks malaria uses to hide from the immune proteins, which may aid in future drug development.

For malaria control goals to be achieved, we must in the future tie funding commitments closer to level of need, says new research by Bob Snow and colleagues from the Kenyan Medical Research Institute-Oxford University-Wellcome Trust Collaborative Programme.

Providing preventive treatment for malaria, given once per term, dramatically reduces rates of malaria infection and anaemia among schoolchildren, and significantly improves their cognitive ability, according to new research published today in the Lancet.

Malaria is one of the most devastating diseases afflicting humanity. It infects and debilitates about 600 million people and kills up to three million people every year, mainly in the wet tropical regions of the world. Children and pregnant women are at particularly high risk.

A huge rise in the numbers of UK residents travelling to malaria endemic areas, combined with a failure to use prevention measures, has significantly increased cases of imported falciparum malaria in the UK over the past 20 years, according to a study published on BMJ.com.

Every year, about 500 million people worldwide are infected with the parasite that causes dysentery, a global medical burden that among infectious diseases is second only to malaria. In a new study appearing in the June 15 issue of Genes and Development, Johns Hopkins researchers may have found a way to ease this burden by discovering a new enzyme that may help the dysentery-causing amoeba evade the immune system.

By disrupting the potassium channel of the malaria parasite, a team of researchers has been able to prevent the malaria parasites from forming in mosquitoes and has thereby broken the cycle of infection during recent animal tests.

Of the four species of Plasmodium (protozoan parasites) that can cause malaria in humans, Plasmodium falciparum is the most dangerous. It is transmitted when an infected human is bitten by an Anopheles mosquito that goes on to bite another person. The pathogen’s life cycle has two distinct phases.

Traveling a little farther than you have originally planned might require you to be safer health-wise. There are many vaccines that your country’s health department recommends before you get somewhere else. However, Malaria is the most common especially traveling to destinations such as South America and Southeast Asia.

Researchers from the Universities of Exeter and Coventry have developed the first new technique for diagnosing malaria able to challenge the rapid diagnostic tests (RDTs) currently used in the field.

April 25 is World Malaria Day 2008 and despite the grim statistics out of Africa there’s cause for celebration. Florida State University biologists have discovered an autoimmune-like response in blood drawn from malaria-infected African children that helps to explain why existing DNA-based anti-malaria vaccines have repeatedly failed to protect them.

New research suggests that not everyone who is bitten by a malaria-infected mosquito develops life threatening health problems according to scientists at the University of Toronto.