Effective Malaria Treatment Is Fraught With Challenges

Malaria has been in existence for thousands of years. Many historical records show that it has affected human civilization greatly by plaguing and causing mass death. The earliest record can be traced back to 2700 BC in China (Cox, 2002). It has been long associated with swamps and insects for hundreds of years but often believed to be the air from swamps causing the plague. The term malaria rooted from two Italian words ‘mala’ and ‘aria’ which literally means bad air. Humanity did not know the true nature of the long thought disease until 1894 when a Scottish physician, Sir Ronald Ross, discovered that it was actually the parasite in mosquito that is causing the malaria.

Malaria has been a major life-threatening disease for thousands of years, and continues to threaten millions of lives around the world. It infects approximately 219 million people each year, mostly poor women and children. What is striking about malaria is the fact that it has the worse effect on those with the least ability to fight the disease. The Republic of Cuba believes that malaria prevention, treatment, and research efforts must be accelerated to eliminate the burden of this disease across Africa, Asia, the Americas, and any country or territory at risk of malaria transmissions.

Brian, G, Y., Greenwood, D, A., Fidock, Dennis, E, K., Stefan, H, I. Kappe, P., Alonso, L., Frank, H and Collins, P (2008) “Malaria progress and prospects for eradication.” Journal Clinical Investiment. 118: 1266-1276.

Aim - To explore the impacts Malaria has on citizens of developing countries which are effect by the disease.

According to the book, the doctor and his crew of medical professionals learned information about malaria at a lake called Zancudo Cocha, which means “Lake of the Malaria Mosquito”. The word “Malaria” actually can be traced back to Italian roots named mal aria, or bad air. It is caused by the anopheles mosquito, which often had a needle that is infested by parasites. When the anopheles mosquito hits a blood vessel and began extracting blood from the target, the parasites traveled through the bloodstream, which is a part of the cardiovascular system, and found a home at the liver. They would then multiplied and return to the bloodstream to destroy red blood cells, causing fever and chills. Even though there is no effective protection against bug bites, the most effective treatment for most forms of malaria would a synthetic pill called chloroquine.

Malaria is a disease that affects nearly 600 million people and causes more than a million deaths a year, the most coming from children under five. This disease is regularly found in more than 100 countries around the world and affects 40% of the world’s population. It is most commonly transmitted by an infected Anopheles mosquito. The most deadly form of malaria is known as Plasmodium falciparum because almost all deaths from malaria are caused by this specific one. Some of the symptoms that are affiliated with this strand of malaria are the destruction of red blood cells along with complications with the kidneys, lungs, and brain. In more serious cases, it can cause permanent neurological effects and even death. As the Nobel Assembly said at the announcement of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, “Diseases caused by parasites have plagued humankind for a millennium and constitute a major global health problem. In particular, parasitic diseases affect the world’s poorest populations and represent a huge barrier to improving human health and wellbeing”. Youyou Tu, one of the winners of the prize, discovered Artemisinin, “a drug that has significantly reduced the mortality rates for patients suffering from malaria by killing the malaria parasites an early stage of their development.”

The symptoms vary because patients are diagnosed with having either uncomplicated or severe malaria. This is due to the fact that different kinds of malaria range in severity. For instance, ,P. falciparum and P. knowlesi infections can cause rapidly progressive severe illness and lead to death death while the other species, P. malariae, P. vivax, or P. ovale are less likely to cause such severe manifestations. Furthermore, P. vivax and P. ovale infections also require treatment for the hypnozoite forms that remain dormant in the liver and can cause a relapsing infection. Finally, P. falciparum and P. vivax species have varying drug resistance patterns in different geographic regions. For P. falciparum and P. knowlesi infections, the urgent initiation of appropriate therapy is especially

Increase the awareness about the ACT anti-malarial treatment and how this treatment method stands up against holistic treatment

There have been many attempts at preventing malaria, none of which have been very successful. These have usually involved protecting human beings from mosquitoes, the dreaded carriers

In the United States, many diseases like the flu are treated easily by available drugs administered by pharmacies. However, in third world countries like Africa, medical supply is not affordable in environments festered with contaminated water supply and lack of food sources. Sub-Saharan Africa is plagued by many diseases, but the most common disease is Malaria. Malaria is a type of disease that is spread by the female mosquito of the genus Anopheles. An individual will start to experience high fevers and chills. If left untreated, the individual could possibly die (Heyneman, 2014). Antimalarial drugs are a type of treatment that can counteract this disease. Doxycycline is an antimalarial drug that is commonly used, however its

For the last year and a half, I have had the privilege of studying Toxoplasma gondii (T. gondii), an apicomplexan parasite. This parasite infects an estimated 30-50% of adults worldwide, most of whom are unaware of their infection. Because it is a close cousin of Plasmodium falciparum, the cause of human malaria, it is also considered a model organism for malaria, a disease that claims the lives of over a million people a year. Thanks to this close relationship, a drug-like compound that has efficacy against one organism will likely have efficacy against the other as well. This research experience lead me to develop a great interest in biomedical research, prompting me to continue on in the same laboratory for my Master’s degree, which I

Artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACTs) are currently considered gold standards in the management of uncomplicated malaria. For the liver stages, primaquine is the only drug approved to eliminate hypnozoites. Resistance against existing antimalarials is well documented, and troubling due to the emerging resistance to artemisinins. Therefore, a rising incidence of drug resistance requires the development new drugs, with novel disease targeting strategies. Moreover, the challenge is to develop innovative drugs that demostrate (i) faster onset and longer duration of drug action, (ii) safe for children and pregnant women, and (iii) ideally be amenable to a single-dose administration. Following are brief descriptions of such innovative

Venezuela is known for its gold mining activities that take place there. These mines are the breeding sites for mosquitoes. The rate of malaria here is very high but they try to fight it. It was the first nation to be certified by the WHO for eradicating malaria in its most populated areas. The malaria is spread to the society once the miners come back home. Sometimes the number of victims rises up to a point where they take all malaria medicine all (Rodriguez, 2014). By 1994, the malaria deaths had fallen by 9%. As days are going by, there are some changes in the handling of the malaria issue. Though there is a lot going in Venezuela, there is shortage of nearly all anti-malaria drugs. The government of Venezuela should ensure that neighbors are not attacked.

Located in the Kingdom Protozoan Malaria is a parasitic mosquito born organism passed to humans by several species of the genus Anopheles and is responsible for about 220 million infections every year and 600,000- 1,200,000 deaths every year. The developing world is disproportionately affected which had led to some unique changes when dealing with infections such as drugs needing to be cheap, administered orally and stable at relatively high temperatures. However in keeping with the old saying prevention is better than cure many methods have been proposed and tested to control the mosquito vector that transmits malaria as supposed to treating the infect after it occurs.

There are four species in the Plasmodium Genus that affect humans: P. falciparum, P. vivax, P. ovale, and P. malariae. What people did not know then, was how the protozoan got from