I also can't help but think another part of our parasite is Malaria.
Bush has spoken of it so much frequently.
Chagas is HERE in the USA (
our blood banks are being tested)
I would not doubt if Malaria isn't one of our Morgellons parasite forms as well.
www.thecrimson.com/printerfriendly.aspx?ref=520972News
Study Helps Explain Variations in MalariaIn vivo testing reveals three malaria groups—one much more severe than others
Published On 11/29/2007 12:51:50 AM
By ALISSA M D'GAMA
Contributing Writer
Why do some malaria patients exhibit only mild flu-like symptoms, while others go into a coma and die?
By examining malaria parasites taken straight from the blood of patients, researchers found three groups of the parasite, one of which was correlated with much more severe symptoms. Previous studies which examined the parasite in laboratory cultures had only found one group.
The study, published yesterday in the online edition of the journal Nature, was the result of an international collaboration between researchers at institutions including the Broad Institute—a joint Harvard-MIT venture—and the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH).
To study the parasite in vivo, Johanna P. Daily—an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and the first author of the study—collected blood samples from over 40 malaria patients in Senegal and worked with her collaborators to isolate the parasites’ genetic material.
By measuring the expression of every gene in the parasite, the authors found “completely novel states that are seen in patients that we never saw in the petri dish,” Daily said.
While one group of parasites had patterns of gene expression like those seen in lab culture, the second group had patterns that were the mirror image of what is seen in culture, and the third group had patterns that were entirely new compared to what had been observed, said Aviv Regev, a member of the Broad Institute and an assistant professor of biology at MIT.
“The parasite is doing a lot more in the host than in lab culture” Regev said.
The authors then took data from yeast, a model organism whose genome has been studied extensively, and looked for similar gene expression patterns.
They found that the first group of parasites corresponded to yeast flourishing in optimal conditions like those grown in culture, the second corresponded to the starvation-response group, and the third corresponded to the stress-response group.
In patients, there was no discernible clinical difference between those infected with the first and second parasite groups, but patients with the third type were more likely to have a severe case of malaria with high inflammation and fever.
Daily said that the experiment showed that “parasites can sense the environment and respond. Up to this study, it was not clear that this was the case.”
Dyann F. Wirth,
co-director of the Infectious Disease Initiative at the Broad Institute and the chair of the HSPH department of immunology and infectious diseases, said that combining different research techniques was the key to the breakthrough.
Dyann F. Wirth??? Maybe somone to write to?www.scidev.net/gateways/index.cfm?fuseaction=printarticle&rgwid=4&item=News&itemid=4097&language=1Research sheds new light on malaria parasite The malaria parasite
Carol Campbell and Mame Aly Konté
29 November 2007
Source: SciDev.NetResearchers have provided the first evidence that malaria parasite development in the always-changing environment of a human host is strikingly different to how it develops in the more consistent surroundings of a laboratory.
The results of their study, published online in Nature today (29 November), may help explain why some patients suffer more extreme symptoms than others.
Researchers from Senegal and the United States screened a number of patients at Velingara Hospital in east Senegal, where malaria is particularly endemic, collecting blood samples from 43 children of varying ages and symptoms.
Subsequent genetic analysis of the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum, found in their blood, revealed that each human host had influenced the parasite's physiology and may have had an impact on its virulence, said co-author Daouda Ndiaye, from the Le Dantec teaching hospital in Dakar, Senegal.
The researchers write that there is a "previously unknown physiological diversity" in the biology of malaria in a living organism.
"This is a real advance," Ndiaye said. "Although only 43 patient samples were studied,
we identified two new biological states of the parasite." They found that parasites can be actively growing, starving or stressed — with only the first of these apparent when studied in culture.
Co-author Elizabeth Winzeler, from the Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation in California, United States, said scientists had been making assumptions about the malaria parasite's metabolism based on laboratory observations, which do not correspond to fluctuating circumstances inside a human host.
"This study shows that we should probably not make such assumptions and that the physiology of parasites inside of people may be different than their physiology inside of laboratory flasks. The work may point to why some drugs do not work as expected in curing disease," she told SciDev.Net.
The study will aid malaria drug development and improves the chance of developing a malaria vaccine, Winzeler added. "This could result in more effective drug combinations, which target both physiological states [in human hosts and laboratory conditions] simultaneously. Better drug combinations would reduce the threat of drug resistance emerging."