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Malaria Parasites Use "Cloaking Devices" to Trick Body

from National Geographic News

Malaria parasites use elaborate forms of deception, such as molecular mimicry, to fool the human immune system, new gene studies say. The discovery could lead to new vaccines for the disease, which kills millions and is rapidly becoming resistant to treatment.

Gene sequencing of two parasites, Plasmodium vivax and Plasmodium knowlesi, comes six years after researchers unraveled the genome of Plasmodium falciparum, the malaria parasite that causes the most fatal infections worldwide. Gene sequencing determines the order of chemical building blocks in a species's DNA.

While P. vivax is rarely fatal and causes less severe infections, it accounts for more than a third of about 500 million infections, most of them in Asia.