Plasmodium

During the early 1900s, the South was plagued by multiple diseases that would negatively impact its people for years to come. This was in part caused by the South’s climate, which helped nurtured a wide variety of diseases ranging from epidemic diseases, like yellow fever, to debilitating illnesses, like hookworm and pellagra. The disease like environment of the South was not only fostered by the climate, but also by the poverty of its people, which led many to be unable to provide a nourished…

combinations Artemisinin (1) based combination therapy has different characteristics and mode of action. It has several advantages as fast reduction of the parasite growth, rapid clearance of symptoms, effective action against multidrug-resistant Plasmodium falciparum, blocks transmission of gametocytes and delay the development of resistance. The derivatives usually have short half-life. If combined with other drugs with longer half-life, it increases the efficacy by reduction of multiple dose…

Cambodia: Epidemiology and Public Health Description and Health Profile Cambodia is a Southeast Asian country home to 14.5 million people, bordered by Thailand, Laos and Vietnam.1 After the communist Pol Pot regime and era of the Khmer Rouge came to an end in the 1970’s, the country has been slowly recovering from the Cambodian genocide and its ramifications.1 The last twenty years have seen relative stability in Cambodia, which has translated into significant improvements in population…

Sickle cell anaemia describes a hereditary autosomal recessive disorder that affects a protein found in red blood cells (erythrocytes) called haemoglobin. Erythrocytes contain about 280 million haemoglobin molecules that are composed of globulin protein and a heme molecule that binds to iron. Haemoglobin allows respiration of oxygen and exchange of carbon dioxide in blood, essential for all body systems. This disorder, determined at contraception, results in 100% of blood cells becoming sickle…

Malaria is a disease caused by parasites, in the genus Plasmodium, that are transmitted between the human population and female Anopheles mosquitoes (Carter R, 2001). Malaria is complex due to the fact that it can infect both humans and mosquitoes, however, it only causes disease with symptoms such as high fever…

We started off Wednesday, knowing we would be covering a topic that was completely new to pretty much everyone attending. We were covering transposable elements. These were first discovered by Barbara McClintock in corn kernels. She noticed that the corn kernels were either colored, or plain- but once in a while they were spotted. Most scientists at the time assumed that the chromosome for color had been repressed or had broken off. However, Dr. McClintock felt that if the chromosome had been…

1. The three treatment options function synergistically to benefit the patient with prostate cancer. The ionizing radiation causes single and double stranded breaks to the neoplastic cells DNA, this halts replication and cell function until it can be repaired. Etoposide is a podophyllotoxin that inhibits topoisomerase II, the enzyme responsible for unwinding the DNA. If the DNA cannot unwind, the cell will be unable to replicate, transcribe mRNA, or repair itself. If the cell is unable to repair…

Over the generations, ancestors evolved different allele frequencies due to recurring natural selection. In fact, natural selection and mutation were considered the main hypotheses for the sickle gene cell. However, those hypotheses limit in explaining the entirety for the frequency of the HbS allele in human populations around the globe. The complex relationship between the HbS allele frequencies and the level of malaria prevalence support the malaria hypothesis at a global scale and further…

Schizophrenia is a severe mental disorder that affects approximately 23.6 million people globally (Global Burden of Disease Study 2013 Collaborators, 2015). The disorder is marked by delusions, hallucinations, disorganized speech and behavior, which typically result in problems related to self-care and general functioning in social and occupational settings (American Psychiatric Association, 2000). Despite the first detailed clinical description having been written in 1810 (Haslam, 1810), and…

anemia is related to the incidence of malaria in the surrounding regions [8]. Evidence that supports the link between the amplification of malaria and sickle cell anemia is that individuals who have a HbS gene, have partial resistance to all forms of plasmodium falciparum malaria infection [8]. In Sub-Saharan Africa, where SCD is most prevalent, it is estimated that more than 230,…