Philanthropy just got easier and a lot more accessible to the public thanks to the social networking power of the Internet and a ground-breaking partnership between a young British entrepreneur, a global health think tank and an African medical research institute.

International investigations of an organism that one UT Southwestern Medical Center researcher calls a “silly little green scum” have led to key insights into the basic mechanisms of reproduction.

Researchers in Colombia, South America, describe a new strategy for designing the next generation of synthetic vaccines that could lead to more effective treatments for fighting malaria, tuberculosis, AIDS and other infectious diseases.

Scientists at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciкncia (IGC), in Portugal, have shown that Malaria eradication in Africa is sustainable, and any re-emergence of malaria in industrialized nations is highly unlikely. Working with colleagues in Kenya, the IGC researchers created a mathematical model of malaria transmission throughout sub-Saharan Africa, published in this week’s PLoS ONE.

FoxNews reports that within the next 18 months, medical researchers at The Seattle Biomedical Research Institute will be asking people in Seattle to volunteer to be exposed to the deadliest form of malaria to help them test the effectiveness of vaccine candidates.

The Seattle Biomedical Research Institute will pay volunteers as much as $4,000 to be bitten by mosquitoes infected with malaria. Malaria is one of the most common infectious diseases and an enormous public health problem.

A new drug that will soon enter clinical trials for treatment of malaria also appears to be 10 times more effective than the key medicine in the current gold-standard treatment for toxoplasmosis, a disease caused by a related parasite that infects nearly one-third of all humans—more than two billion people worldwide.

ETH Zurich professor Peter Seeberger has been working on a sugar-based malaria vaccine for years. The new test takes him one important step closer to his goal. The malaria pathogen plasmodium falciparum carries poisonous sugar molecules – called GPIs for short – on its surface that are able to be individually identified.

More than 2.3 billion people, or about 35% percent of the world’s population, live in areas where there is risk of a deadly form of malaria, according to a spatial distribution map published in PLoS Medicine.

Malaria is a constant threat to US military personnel operating in Afghanistan, but some troops may face further risk, as epidemiologists have revealed a significant prevalence of contraindications to the safe use of the anti-malarial drug, mefloquine.

A study published in PLoS Medicine this week suggests that of women who die during pregnancy and childbirth in sub-Saharan Africa, more may die from treatable infectious diseases than from conditions directly linked to pregnancy.

A unique collaboration between scientists, public health workers and police has led to the arrest by the Chinese authorities of alleged traders of fake anti-malarial drugs in southern China and the seizure of a large quantity of drugs.