Malaria found in new hiding place in the body
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Malaria is known for entering the bloodstream via a mosquito bite, but it has been found to have another trick up its sleeve.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Scientists have found that the deadly parasite can lurk undetected in the spleen, which filters blood.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Not only does this discovery change what we know about the biology of the disease, but it has significant implications for malaria elimination programs, according to the researchers.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“What we found is that there are some people walking around that have malaria parasites in their spleen and not in their [circulating] blood,” said lead author Steven Kho, from the Menzies School of Health Research.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Dr Kho says one of the other problems is people with infected spleens show no symptoms, so they are unlikely to seek medical treatment.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">This means they could be carriers and able to transmit the disease if a mosquito bites them and once the parasite moves back into the bloodstream.</span></p>
<p><strong>Why the spleen matters</strong></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Playing a critical role in the immune system, blood flows in and out of the spleen to filter out abnormal and dead blood cells.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">This filtering process puts the spleen under a large amount of pressure and people in areas where malaria is common often have enlarged spleens.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“If the spleen only removes parasites, we should only see parasite remnants or evidence of dead parasites [in the spleen],” Dr Kho said.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Instead, the researchers found live malaria parasites in 95 percent of the spleens they examined, collected from 22 people living in the Indonesian province of Papua who had their spleens removed after rupturing during an accident.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">These people showed no symptoms of the disease and no parasites were found in their blood, large amounts of the two most common species were found in their spleen.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">This discovery could mean that the spleen acts as a hiding place for the first stage of the parasites, before they enter blood cells and cause disease.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“That shows if they are viable, they can come out again, so there’s a possibility for reseeding an infection that makes someone feel sick, but also able to transmit it onward,” said Dr Justin Boddey of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, who was not involved in the research.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“I can see this [discovery] having a huge influence in the way we understand malaria transmission into the mosquito and back out of the mosquito, and the disease itself,” Dr Boddey said.</span></p>
