Vaccination & Eradication

Malaria eradication has been a priority for the World Health Organization (WHO). The discovery of the insecticide DDT in 1942 has been successfully lowered malaria rates in many parts of the world. However, it was discontinued to be use due to environmental toxicity. Hence, the current measures that protect against infection are still mosquito-focused. For example, protective clothing, repellents, bed nets, and mosquito control programs.

Since Plasmodium falciparum causes disease on human cardiovascular and lymphatic system, hormones that regulate cardiovascular function and drugs that control blood pressure could be use as a tool to control malaria infection. These findings, has been published in article in the Sept. 19, 2003 issue of the journal Science by Kasturi Haldar, Jon Lomasney, Travis Harrison and colleagues at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University .

As a consequence, beta-blockers, which are safe, inexpensive and commonly prescribed drugs used worldwide to treat high blood pressure, are proposed to use against the deadliest and most drug-resistant strain of malaria parasites.

In fact, there is also research done in other approach which focused on identifying and blocking the process by which red blood cells allow parasite entry. Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor in Pathology and professor of microbiology-immunology at the Feinberg School are putting their effort into this study.

Overall, there is still hope for vaccination and eradication to be continuously developed in the near future.

Idea vaccine for malaria today

Possess 3 important charactheristics:

• multi-stage : incorporating antigenic characteristics at multiple stages of P. falciparum’s life cycle.
• multi-valent : possess multiple epitopes restricted by different MHC molecules
• multi-immune : inducing more than one type of immune response