( Scientists have discovered why some peo...)Scientists Unveil Mechanism Behind Resistance to Severe Malaria ,Health

Scientists have discovered why some people are less prone to malaria//. The people with a specific type of hemoglobin — the oxygen-carrying molecule that gives red blood cells their color — are less prone to severe malaria. In a series of experiments, the researchers determined how hemoglobin type C impairs the ability of malaria parasites to cause disease symptoms.

“This research gives us a new insight into malaria, a major global killer that preys especially on young children and claims a life every 30 seconds,” notes Anthony S. Fauci, M.D., director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, where the research was conducted.

“If we better understand the natural protective mechanisms against malaria, we might be able to mimic that protective effect through vaccines or drugs,” says NIAID researcher Thomas E. Wellems, M.D., Ph.D., whose team’s findings appear this week in the journal Nature.

Nature has probably mutated the hemoglobin gene to protect the people from malaria in endemic regions. Hemoglobin exists in several varieties. Hemoglobin A is the most common, but in parts of West Africa, where malaria is rife, one-fourth of the population has at least one gene for hemoglobin C. Children with at least one hemoglobin C gene are less prone to deadly cerebral malaria, in which parasite-infected red blood cells accumulate in the brain. But the mystery is how does hemoglobin C confers this protection to the person. To solve the mystery, Dr. Wellems and his colleagues studied laboratory-infected red blood cells and blood drawn from children with malaria from the African nation of Mali and studied three phenenomenon and found how well parasitized red blood cells can be made to stick to one another, to uninfected red blood cells and to blood vessel walls. These phenomena — known respectively as agglutination, rosetting and cytoadherence — all depend on a parasite p
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