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Tracy Hampton, PhD

JAMA. 2005;294:418.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

Researchers at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases have discovered why individuals with a certain type of hemoglobin in their blood are less prone to severe malaria. The investigators found naturally protective effects of hemoglobin C that can impair malaria parasites (Fairhurst et al. Nature. 2005;435:1117-1121). While hemoglobin A is the most common form of hemoglobin, one fourth of individuals in parts of West Africa (where malaria is endemic) has at least one gene for hemoglobin C.

The effectiveness of malarial parasites and their ability to evade the host immune system depend on how well they can make parasitized red blood cells "sticky." For example, malarial proteins attach to red blood cells and cause the cells to stick to capillaries, which keep them from being cleared from the bloodstream. Through studies of blood drawn from children with malaria and of red blood cells infected . . . [Full Text of this Article]