Malaria

A genetic mutation that originally protected Africans from a virulent form of malaria now renders them 40% more susceptible to HIV infections, offering a partial explanation for the disproportionate spread of the virus among Africans and African Americans, researchers reported today. The mutation, however, has an unusual benefit. It also slows progression of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, giving patients an extra two years of life, said Dr. Sunil K.

With $3 billion in new pledges, world leaders say they believe that an ambitious goal to stop deaths from malaria by 2015 is finally within reach. A plan billed as the most comprehensive ever to tackle the mosquito-borne disease, which kills nearly 1 million people each year, was unveiled last week at a United Nations gathering of heads of government, global health leaders and philanthropists.

So many world leaders have converged on the United Nations over the last week that at one point billionaire Bill Gates was left cooling his heels on East 46th Street in a "pedestrian freeze" while a presidential motorcade whizzed the wrong way down 1st Avenue. The founder of Microsoft was on his way to a U.N. summit to donate $167.8 million to eradicate malaria. Which makes you wonder: Which president was that anyway?

The boy was feverish, vomiting, and wouldn't eat. His mother rushed him to a village clinic, suspecting measles, typhoid or one of the other usual childhood ailments found in Kenya's central highlands. Instead, the doctor diagnosed a disease she knew little about: malaria. Though it is Africa's biggest killer, malaria has always been a regional blight. In the secluded coffee-farming villages around Mt.

Kenya is saving children's lives with a national program to distribute insecticide-treated bed nets to prevent malaria, researchers reported Friday in the journal Lancet. For every 1,000 nets used, the lives of seven children were saved, they said. Malaria kills a child every 30 seconds, mainly African children younger than 5, according to the World Health Organization.

An experimental malaria vaccine protected 65% of Mozambique infants who received a full course of injections, paving the way for a large clinical trial of what could be the first vaccine against the deadly disease, researchers reported Wednesday. Infants are among the most vulnerable to malaria. Immunization of infants has proved difficult for a variety of illnesses, including measles and pneumococcal disease.

Intermittent treatment of children with the drugs artesunate and sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine sharply reduced malaria frequency in a study in Senegal. One dose of the drugs or a placebo was given to children under the age of 5 three times during malaria season. A team from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine reported in the journal the Lancet that those receiving the drug had 86% fewer episodes of the disease.

EVERY year, about 1,300 people in the United States learn they have malaria. Most are travelers, and many are blase about malaria. If they had taken antimalarial pills as directed -- before, during and after the trip -- and followed simple precautions, such as using insect repellent, they would have greatly reduced the risk of getting the mosquito-transmitted disease. Worldwide, malaria affects up to 500 million people a year; a million die of the disease annually.

UC Berkeley researchers have engineered yeast to produce a precursor to artemisinin, the most effective antimalarial drug known -- an achievement that could drastically lower the cost of the drug. Artemisinin is nearly 100% effective in curing malaria, but it must be laboriously extracted from the sweet wormwood plant, \o7Artemisia annua\f7, grown primarily in China. A three-day supply of the drug costs $2.40 -- a big hurdle in developing countries where malaria is endemic.

Most of the world's millions of malaria sufferers are not getting life-saving drugs nearly five years after the World Health Organization urged their widespread use, health experts said. Malaria kills more than a million people each year, mainly in Africa, where a child dies from the disease every 30 seconds. Only four of the 34 countries that have agreed to switch to more effective but costly artemisin-based drug combinations, known as ACTs, are widely distributing the medication.