Malaria clusters in Spore....

[makapaaa]

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By Desmond Wong, Channel NewsAsia | Posted: 07 June 2009 1815 hrs
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Malaria afflicts mainly people in the tropical parts of Africa, Asia and South and Central America</TD></TR><TR><TD></TD><TD class=update></TD></TR><TR><TD></TD><TD></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>

SINGAPORE: In May, 14 people in Singapore came down with malaria, which is a serious and potentially deadly disease that is transmitted through bites from infected Anopheles mosquitoes.

The Health Ministry (MOH) said it is investigating the cases as suspected local transmission, as all 14 cases did not travel overseas recently.

The first malaria cluster at Jurong Island involved five foreign workers, aged between 25 and 37. The workers came down with fever, headache and chills between May 3 and 25.

Four of the workers stayed at the same dormitory and worked at the same site on Jurong Island, while the fifth worker worked near their dormitory and worksite.

The second cluster at Sungei Kadut and Mandai involved eight foreign workers from different dormitories and one full-time National Serviceman. This group of patients fell sick between May 16 and 30.

As of Saturday, 12 of the 14 patients have been discharged.

The National Environment Agency (NEA) has conducted inspections at the worksites and dormitories in the affected areas, and has instructed dormitory operators to carry out pest control measures.

MOH is monitoring the situation closely and will update the public on any new developments.


- CNA/so
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[makapaaa]

I cannot imagine my FT pets to bring in all sorts of funny disease, u know? *hee*hee*​

 

[Eurekas]

I cannot imagine my FT pets to bring in all sorts of funny disease, u know? *hee*hee*​

Malaria will be back in vogue with overcrowding and increasing numbers of disease carrying foreign trash.

 

[ScarFace]

New form of drug-resistant malaria discovered
A new form of drug-resistant malaria that threatens the front-line of defence against the disease has been discovered in Cambodia.
By Ben Leach
Published: 10:12AM BST 30 Jul 2009

A malaria that resists the drug artemisinin, which was considered a wonder cure for the disease, has been spreading rapidly in the region, causing concern that it could spread globally.

The drug, which is popular because it is fast-acting, has few side effects and was almost 100 per cent effective, is the first choice for combating the parasitic infection, which kills about a million people each year.

But a study has found that malaria patients in the province of Pailin in western Cambodia are taking far longer than normal to recover, and many are not recovering at all.

Arjen Dondorp, the leader of the World Health Organisation study, said: "Artemisinin should clear the parasites at an early stage, preventing them further maturing and reproducing.

"When the drug's action is impaired, it becomes more difficult to eliminate the parasites from the body," he states in The New England Journal of Medicine.

The survey, the first detailed analysis of artemisinin-resistance in the field, compared how long it took to treat 40 malaria patients in Cambodia with a comparable set of patients in neighbouring north-west Thailand.

"Our study suggests that malarial parasites in Cambodia are less susceptible to artemisinin than those in Thailand. This means it takes longer to kill the parasites," Dr Dondorp added.

"We do not see 100 per cent resistance, but the parasite is much less susceptible to artemisinin than we are used to. If used in combination with other drugs we can still cure malaria but it takes a few days longer," said Dr Dondorp.

"It is a very worrying trend because instead of being able to kill the parasite in 48 hours it now takes about 84 hours. This longer time means that in some patients the parasite is not completely eradicated from the body, allowing the few parasites that are left to grow and reappear weeks later."

The WHO, whose study was part-funded by a British medical research charity, the Wellcome Trust, has begun trying to contain the spread of the drug-resistant parasite for fear of it spreading globally.

 

[ScarFace]

Mosquitoes deliver malaria "vaccine" through bites
By MARILYNN MARCHIONE (AP) – 1 day ago

In a daring experiment in Europe, scientists used mosquitoes as flying needles to deliver a "vaccine" of live malaria parasites through their bites.

The results were astounding: Everyone in the vaccine group acquired immunity to malaria; everyone in a non-vaccinated comparison group did not, and developed malaria when exposed to the parasites later.

The study was only a small proof-of-principle test, and its approach is not practical on a large scale. However, it shows that scientists may finally be on the right track to developing an effective vaccine against one of mankind's top killers. A vaccine that uses modified live parasites just entered human testing.

"Malaria vaccines are moving from the laboratory into the real world," Dr. Carlos Campbell wrote in an editorial accompanying the study in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine. He works for PATH, the Program for Appropriate Technology in Health, a Seattle-based global health foundation.

The new study "reminds us that the whole malaria parasite is the most potent immunizing" agent, even though it is harder to develop a vaccine this way and other leading candidates take a different approach, he wrote.

Malaria kills nearly a million people each year, mostly children under 5 and especially in Africa. Infected mosquitoes inject immature malaria parasites into the skin when they bite; these travel to the liver where they mature and multiply. From there, they enter the bloodstream and attack red blood cells — the phase that makes people sick.

People can develop immunity to malaria if exposed to it many times. The drug chloroquine can kill parasites in the final bloodstream phase, when they are most dangerous.

Scientists tried to take advantage of these two factors, by using chloroquine to protect people while gradually exposing them to malaria parasites and letting immunity develop.

They assigned 10 volunteers to a "vaccine" group and five others to a comparison group. All were given chloroquine for three months, and exposed once a month to about a dozen mosquitoes — malaria-infected ones in the vaccine group and non-infected mosquitoes in the comparison group.

That was to allow the "vaccine" effect to develop. Next came a test to see if it was working.

All 15 stopped taking chloroquine. Two months later, all were bitten by malaria-infected mosquitoes. None of the 10 in the vaccine group developed parasites in their bloodstreams; all five in the comparison group did.

The study was done in a lab at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, and was funded by two foundations and a French government grant.

"This is not a vaccine" as in a commercial product, but a way to show how whole parasites can be used like a vaccine to protect against disease, said one of the Dutch researchers, Dr. Robert Sauerwein.

"It's more of an in-depth study of the immune factors that might be able to generate a very protective type of response," said Dr. John Treanor, a vaccine specialist at the University of Rochester Medical Center in Rochester, N.Y., who had no role in the study.

The concept already is in commercial development. A company in Rockville, Md. — Sanaria Inc. — is testing a vaccine using whole parasites that have been irradiated to weaken them, hopefully keeping them in an immature stage in the liver to generate immunity but not cause illness.

Two other reports in the New England Journal show that resistance is growing to artemisinin, the main drug used against malaria in the many areas where chloroquine is no longer effective. Studies in Thailand and Cambodia found the malaria parasite is less susceptible to artemisinin, underscoring the urgent need to develop a vaccine.