Current Topics in Malaria

Download or read book Current Topics in Malaria written by Alfonso J. Rodriguez-Morales and published by Intechopen. This book was released on 2016-11-30 with total page 508 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Malaria causes hundreds of thousands of human deaths every year, and the World Health Assembly has made it a priority. To help eliminate this disease, there is a pressing need for the development and implementation of new strategies to improve the prevention and treatment, due in part to antimalarial drug resistances. This chapter focuses on two strategies to inactivate the malaria parasite in blood, which are photodynamic therapy (PDT) and inhibition of hemozoin formation. The PDT strategy permits either a control of the proliferation of mosquito larvae to develop some photolarvicides for the prevention or a photoinactivation of the malaria parasite in red blood cells (RBCs) to minimize infection transmission by transfusion. The inhibition of hemozoin formation strategy is used for the development of new antimalarial drug by understanding its formation mechanism.