Nature Medicine | Spoonful of Medicine

The big malaria split

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Celebrities and politicians have been putting their twittering thumbs to work this week to raise funds for bednets (to protect people in malaria-endemic regions). Bill Gates, one of those tweeting on the subject, also went on record saying it the lack of attention to malaria vaccine research a decade ago was “criminal”.

Amidst all the buzz over malaria, a study out in the Journal of Infectious Diseases on Monday suggests that there’s still much that we don’t understand about the parasites that cause it. In the paper, Colin Sutherland of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and his colleagues offer evidence that Plasmodium ovale — one of the five species of the malaria Plasmodium parasite — might actually be two species. The scientists came to this conclusion after conducting genetic analyses of 55 isolates from 15 countries, 12 in Africa and three in the Asia-Pacific region.


If P. ovale should be split into two species, it raises questions as to whether the two species as associated with different clinical outcomes in the people they infect.

P. ovale is considered rare and less worrisome than P. falciparum and P. vivax. But Sutherland and his colleagues crunch some numbers, and find that P. ovale is more common among imported symptomatic malaria cases to the UK than one would predict. Following this logic, they urge vigilance: “Our present investigation also led us to agree with [others] that the contribution of P. ovale infections to malaria morbidity is significantly underestimated, probably as a result of misdiagnosis.”

Since P. ovale sequences appear to vary between the two species that Sutherland proposes, it would be worth exploring whether diagnostic tests detect both equally well. To ignore this possibility might not be “criminal”, but it would be wholly unwise.

Image by prep4mdC via Flickr Creative Commons

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