How important is gametocyte clearance after malaria therapy?
- Author(s)
- Karunajeewa, HA; Mueller, I;
- Details
- Publication Year 2016,Volume 14,Issue #1,Page 93
- Journal Title
- BMC Med
- Publication Type
- Journal Article
- Abstract
- There has been increasing interest in the role of malaria drugs in preventing malaria transmission from humans to mosquitoes, which would help augment malaria control and elimination strategies. Nevertheless, only one stage in the malaria parasite life cycle, the gametocyte, is infectious to mosquitoes. The Worldwide Antimalarial Resistance Network (WWARN) have analyzed data from 48,840 patients from 141 clinical trials in order to define the nature and determinants of gametocyte clearance following artemisinin combination treatment (ACT) for symptomatic malaria infections. However, the presence of gametocytes does not always predict their infectivity, meaning that the microscopy-based methods used by the WWARN investigators represent an imperfect surrogate marker of transmissibility. Their findings, that some ACTs clear gametocytes faster than others, should be interpreted in light of these limitations and important gaps in our understanding of the biology and epidemiology of malaria transmission.Please see related article: https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12916-016-0621-7.
- Publisher
- BioMed Central
- Research Division(s)
- Population Health And Immunity
- PubMed ID
- 27317420
- Publisher's Version
- https://doi.org/10.1186/s12916-016-0641-3
- Open Access at Publisher's Site
http://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12916-016-0641-3- Terms of Use/Rights Notice
- Refer to copyright notice on published article.
Creation Date: 2016-08-09 12:01:43
Last Modified: 2016-08-09 12:24:22