Transcript for:
Understanding Malaria: Causes and Solutions

hi and welcome to the second disease out of six diseases this is malaria malaria is caused by plasmodium which is a productivist it is a unicellular eukaryote which means it has a true nucleus it has all the organelles you think an animal has it also has okay it is often referred to as a parasite because well it benefits itself but it harms the host now in humans malaria is caused by these four particular species especially 75 percent time it is caused by plasmodium falciparum plus and then 20 percent of time is caused by plasmodium bivacs other times it's caused by plasmodium malaria and plasmodium ovale now all four of these you have to remember but most of all plasmodium oxypo now the appearance of this plasmodium changes depending on life cycle stages your life cycle stages sort of like you know butterflies having a caterpillar stage a cocoon stage and a butterfly stage right this organism has live stages that look different like this there's a slender farm there's a little tiny form and there's a big guy from learning to know the names of them that's fine now um during its initial infective stages plasmodium will be most mortal and have this slender shape here in order to move quickly through your bloodstream wonderful things now let's talk a little bit about what you should write in exam now a vector which you should know the definition for is an organism that carries a disease from a person to another from an animal to a human again only female anopheles mosquitoes will bite only the females bite because it needs to supply its eggs with nutrients although malaria actually can also be transmitted through blood transfusions use of instagram needles and can pass across placenta from mother child but um that is very rare mostly it's true the female and or police masculine now let's talk a bit about the life stages just telling the video but let's talk about it in word format and what they want from unit exam now again for transmission you always need to talk about what happens to the infected person and how the uninfected person gets it so here the mosquito takes a blood meal from an infected person and then goes on and takes another bird meal from an uninfected person and that's how malaria spreads but what happens in between and inside the person so in the mosquito in the first place plasmonium gametes are fusing it's multiplying and they form infective stages so they go from this big large guy appearance to these long slender forms and when the muscle tower like you see in the video takes a blood meal it um it puts its mouth parts into this through the skin secretes anticoagulant and saliva and with the saliva the parasite will enter the host together with the survivor that's a very important point it's always a mud point after the parasite is long slender mortal thing enters you it enters the bloodstream and then it goes to the liver cells it matures there to form this little guy here and then leaves the liver to enter the red blood cells now the parasites multiply in the rapid cells and causing the ribosome lie and once it lies and has more of them they can infect other red blood cells and then what is left is just for it to be picked up by another mosquito in another blood meal in order to pass it on to another person so it is quite um it's quite a horror movie isn't it so this is a diagram here all the numbers here correspond to the previous slide i will again highlight to you that it's very important to know that hey where does the parasites go number one it goes to the bloodstream then it goes to a liver and then it goes to redwood cells okay there's three things very important bloodstream liver rapid cells moving on now what are the symptoms that we can sort of expect from it we can expect fever so normal inflammation sickness sort of thing um anemia because a lot of red blood cells are lysing and there won't be enough red blood cells nausea headaches muscle pain strength and much thing there's also a lot more actually now how do you diagnose these kind of diseases well um one suspected and other than the symptoms you can do a microscopical analysis of blood and um if you put it under the microscope this is something that you might see this is this is um a plasmodium in its motel long slenders other than that there's actually also a dipstick test so there is an antigen test for malaria in the blood you can just put you can just put a drop of blood there and then it will show you whether it's positive or negative so unfortunately with malaria there is treatment to help reduce the symptoms there are anti-mural drugs and here is um a few examples so many more quinine chloroquine and artemisinin artemisinin is a drug that china is very proud of because they found it through chinese herbal medicine just so you know now chloroquine is um a drug and what it does it tries to inhibit protein synthesis and prevents the parasite from spreading in body if the parasite cannot undergo protein synthesis cannot replicate so yay for us now uh other drugs like programming which is minus this but it is a drug inhibit sexual reproduction of plasmodium in the mosquito so if you eat it and another mosquito picks up this parasite through the blood the mosquito cannot spread it other people because plasmodium in the mosquito cannot reproduce and cannot form infective stages so um you realize that every one of these drugs would be acting on a different part of the transmission cycle which is very interesting now these drugs actually are used in in combination we call this combination therapy use multiple drugs at the same time and this is used to prevent drug resistance you have multiple things at a time you attack the plasmodium from different angles and make sure it dies quick and it's not resistant to your drug no chance for it to develop no time so other than treatment though prevention is always better than cure how do you prevent malaria now there is no vaccine for malaria and we will talk more about this in chapter 11. so how do we prevent them so number one we can use a prophylactic or preventing drugs preventive is equivalent to prophylactic um for example you can use chloroquine you can eat color green even though you don't have malaria to prevent yourself from getting it number two you can reduce the number of mosquitoes think of dengue and how we try to reduce the spread of dengue malaria is pretty much the same reduce the number of mosquitoes here are a few interesting examples that cie has suggested number one is to spray insecticides which we all know the material is to spread all over the water surface i misspelled that to prevent mosquitoes from breeding to breed fish that feeds on lava interesting which some of my aunties use and even spray certain bacteria that can attack mosquito larva and kill them now the best prevention though it is to prevent mosquito from fighting because you can reduce number of mosquitoes but of course um there will still be a few running around flying around i mean so best method is to prevent bites use mosquito nets soak muscular nuts and insecticides sleep in mosquito nets use muscular repellent um don't expose skin when mosquitoes are active at dusk for example so everything you know about dengue prevention you can use it here [Music] next next expect we need to learn is the global distribution now look at this map here this is a very typical distribution map uh someone she will see this in the exams you can see this red region here where malaria occurs in high frequencies and many many cases here these orange bits are less so but for all these areas there is one common factor the common factor is that you guess it it is near the equator it is endemic malaria is endemic in tropical and subtropical areas and the reason is because the mosquitoes or the vector lives there the vector survives and reads in hot and humid areas the best and it needs that still stagnant water to reproduce so it cannot be a place that is too dry on the other hand plasmodium also needs a temperature to reproduce this is an important point that you can write in exams as well plasmodium can reproduce within the mosquito at temperatures above 20 degrees it needs that temperature so it will not reproduce and will not spread other reasons that it's only endemic in this areas is also because outside the tropics there were only a few places and it was easily eradicated for example in usa and in italy now malaria like cholera and other diseases also face other problems why do we still have malaria and why are we still battling it since we know all the treatment and prevention methods now it's because we have trouble with drug resistant plasmodium some of the plasmodium some of the parasites are no longer responsive to drugs means we need this is why we need to use combination therapy use multiple drugs at the same time to prevent this from becoming faster we also need more new drugs number two is insecticide resistant moleskines if you realize recently that when you spray mosquito spray not all the mosquitoes will die some of them will still be alive now that's because mosquitoes have adapted to insecticides most common being ddt ddt is most common insecticides used in many many households and a lot of those aren't responding anymore and besides it's not responding and these insecticides also accidentally would kill other organisms organisms like bees that are actually helpful for the environment also dietitian so basically our insecticides are killing things that we want to survive and killing and not killing the mosquitoes very bad and even if they work there has been problems because some local communities have reported it's very interesting phenomenon when they reduce the number of mosquitoes by spraying insecticides this caused them to lose immunity to malaria because the mosquitoes they're not there so they cannot spread mirror around so malaria is absent and therefore they have no immunity against it and when the disease returned they actually had a higher amount of cases and more vulnerable now than ever and the last is the most surprising and the most interesting the tree is global warming and because places that are usually not so warm are now warmer and therefore they are in general more warm areas for mosquitoes to breed and survive and temperatures there are more temperatures more areas with temperatures suitable for plasmodium to reproduce in the mosquitoes gut as well so that is bad but so the malaria the the fight against malaria is still ongoing and more education is needed like through this video so that's it for malaria i'll see you next video bye