Word: plasmodia
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Malaria is fought by fighting mosquitoes or by interrupting the plasmodia life-cycle at some point. Men use old-fashioned mosquito nets, oil on mosquito-breeding water, citronella to keep from getting the dangerous mosquito bites. In some parts of India the U.S. Army does not employ native labor lest the mosquitoes pick up plasmodia from their blood. Antimalarial chemicals can kill sexual forms of the protozoa in a patient's blood, prevent a mosquito from carrying his infection to others. No known chemical kills plasmodia in the form mosquitoes deliver to man. Chemicals can get them after they...
...Quinine, the old standby, is now available only from the not-very-large stocks which were in the U.S. when Japan invaded the East Indies. It acts by destroying the asexual forms of all kinds of plasmodia in the human blood stream-the forms which produce the shivering, sweating and fever. Quinine also destroys the sexual forms of all but P. falciparum, which means that even after he is "cured" by quinine a patient with malignant tertian malaria can give the protozoa to any suitable mosquito...
First the plasmodia enter the oxygen-bearing red blood cells. From the liquid part of the blood oozes a sticky jelly which clumps all the cells together. These clumps are gobbled down by white blood corpuscles. If the white cells are strong enough, the body wins...
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