{"id":34496,"date":"2021-10-16T18:37:23","date_gmt":"2021-10-16T23:37:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/?p=34496"},"modified":"2021-10-16T18:37:23","modified_gmt":"2021-10-16T23:37:23","slug":"this-hadnt-occurred-to-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/2021\/10\/16\/this-hadnt-occurred-to-me\/","title":{"rendered":"This Hadn&#8217;t Occurred To Me"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>But it&#8217;s really just another evolutionary pressure, at least when followed by an <em>exterminating medicine<\/em>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Cheap rapid tests for malaria have helped drive down\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.newscientist.com\/article\/malaria-no-longer-decline-worry-us\/\">the prevalence of the disease<\/a>\u00a0in many parts of Africa. But just 15 years or so after their introduction, \u201cstealthy\u201d malaria parasites have evolved that can no longer be detected by the standard rapid tests.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThis is a major threat to malaria control,\u201d says\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/ch.linkedin.com\/in\/jane-cunningham-110576112\">Jane Cunningham<\/a>\u00a0at the World Health Organization Global Malaria Programme in Geneva.<\/p>\n<p>In many African countries, only people whose rapid test results are positive get treated. But in Eritrea around 2016, health workers noticed that many children who appeared to be\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.newscientist.com\/article\/mg25033320-100-can-we-finally-wipe-out-malaria-with-a-vaccine-37-years-in-the-making\/\">really sick with malaria<\/a>\u00a0were testing negative. When medics looked at blood samples under a microscope, they could see many of the children were indeed infected.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt was a crisis situation,\u201d says Cunningham. \u201cThey thought there was something wrong with the test.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Instead, her team found that up to 80 per cent of the malaria parasites in the area have mutations that mean they no longer produce the two proteins \u2013 called pfhrp2 and pfhrp3 \u2013 detected by the rapid tests.<em> [&#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.newscientist.com\/article\/2291463-parasite-evolution-is-making-it-harder-to-detect-and-treat-malaria\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Parasite evolution is making it harder to detect and treat malaria<\/a>,&#8221; Michael Le Page, <\/em><strong>NewScientist<\/strong><em> (2 October 2021)]<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>A fascinating change, isn&#8217;t it? Although the operational characteristics suggest that this is not a case of the mutation surviving the medication, but rather that the medicating never occurs. I do not know enough about detection tests to guess if this means a carrier only carried the mutation, or if the mutation simply outnumbers the predecessor.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>But it&#8217;s really just another evolutionary pressure, at least when followed by an exterminating medicine: Cheap rapid tests for malaria have helped drive down\u00a0the prevalence of the disease\u00a0in many parts of Africa. But just 15 years or so after their introduction, \u201cstealthy\u201d malaria parasites have evolved that can no longer \u2026 <a class=\"continue-reading-link\" href=\"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/2021\/10\/16\/this-hadnt-occurred-to-me\/\"> Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr; <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34496","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34496","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34496"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34496\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34497,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34496\/revisions\/34497"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34496"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34496"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34496"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}