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WASHINGTON (Reuters) – An international team of researchers has adopted a new approach to fighting malaria, which eliminates parasites that spread to the liver before they reach the blood.
Female mosquitoes transmit plasmodium parasites that multiply in the liver before circulating in the blood after about 10 days.
At this point, the symptoms of the disease begin to appear: fever, headache, joint pain, then anemia and breathing problems can be fatal. The disease kills half a million people a year, the majority of whom are children from Africa.
An international team of researchers who published the results of his research in the journal Science is working on a way to eliminate liver parasites before they reach the bloodstream and cause symptoms of the most antimalarial drugs attack blood parasites.
"It's very difficult to focus on the liver phase," said Elizabeth Winsler, a professor of pharmacology at the University of California at San Diego, who is the lead author of the research. "The cells are hard to reach and the risk of side effects increases.
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