Reduced in-hospital mortality after improved management of children less than 5 years of age admitted to hospital with malaria: randomized trial

According to a report launched today in the UK by Australian researchers at The George Institute for International Health, 16 new malaria vaccine candidates are now in clinical trials; six new malaria drugs are about to reach the market; and by 2011 we will have up to 12 new anti-malarial drug product registered.

Donors are meeting in Berlin this week to determine how much money to give to the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. Fund officials say about 50 delegations from donor countries, the private sector, ngos, civil society and UN organizations are attending the meeting.

Researchers at the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institutet (KI) and the Swedish Institute for Infectious Disease Control (SMI) have identified the biochemical mechanism behind the adhesive protein that give rise to particularly serious malaria in children.

Global warming is often in the news these days, usually in connection with changing, and sometimes destructive, weather patterns. But the World Health Organization says rising temperatures also have alarming implications for public health.

About 2 million people die of malaria every year, of which more than a million are children in sub-Saharan Africa. Malaria is caused by a protozoan parasite belonging to the genus Plasmodium, and Plasmodium falciparum is responsible for the most severe form of malaria.

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.

Malaria researchers have developed a global network to track drug-resistant forms of the mosquito-borne disease. The World Antimalarial Research Network (WARN) is an online effort to spread research about malaria outbreaks that is often left languishing in health bureaucracies.

A global network to monitor drug resistance and guide malaria treatment and prevention policies is being launched.

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.

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.

As summer temperatures cool in the United States, fewer mosquitoes whir around our tiki torches. But mosquitoes swarming around nearly 40 percent of the world’s population will continue to spread a deadly parasitic disease — malaria. Now an interdisciplinary team led by researchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has found a key link that causes malarial infection in both humans and mosquitoes.