Parnad Basu, Amity University Kolkata
Among the five species of Plasmodium (P. falciparum, P. malariae, P. vivax, P. ovale, and P. knowlesi.) that cause malaria, P. falciparum can be fatal. On one hand, it can cause liver failure to coma, on the other hand, it is somewhat resistant to the malarial drugs. The thing that kept scientists thinking is how does it survive the dry season between two wet seasons. The dry season is when the virulence of P. falciparum dips down, and the wet season is when it affects people. So why do we see a surge in malaria infection in the wet season typically?
To uncover the mystery behind this a team of scientists conducted a study on Malian where each year a huge number of peoples die due to malaria. In the wet season, the malarial parasite disappears from blood circulation by adhering to the blood vessels wall inside the red blood cell. Malarial parasites use VSA (variant surface antigens) to stick to the blood vessels. Doing so, they easily evade the innate immune clearance mechanisms in the spleen. But the study shows that in the dry season, the adhesion qualities of the parasites lack. Because of this, only a few malarial parasites stick to the blood vessels whereas the other parasites face splenic clearance. This helps the parasites to be present in the host body without triggering the immune response. When the next wet season comes these parasites transform into gametocytes which then gets ingested by mosquitoes and carried to a new host.
In the dry season, the host who carries dormant malarial parasites is asymptomatic but sometimes a slight fever was noted. Mosquito saliva and human allergies due to mosquito saliva trigger this transformation from parasites to gametocytes. That being said, how mosquito bite alters the development of the parasite in the human host to favour enhanced development and transmission to mosquitoes is still unknown.
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Reference: DOI: 10.1038/s41591-020-1084-0
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