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News About Pfizer's Most Popular Pill

posted by martyb on Saturday May 23 2015, @08:52PM   Printer-friendly
from the giving-malaria-the-blues dept.

"gewg_" writes with news of a story appearing in The Register: Viagra makes it HARD for malaria, bug-boffins discover:

The Bill & Melinda Gates foundation has been buying Viagra, in a good cause: it seems to help beat one of the common malaria parasites, Plasmodium falciparum.

The mechanism is even analogous to Viagra's better-known effect: it makes infected red blood cells stiffer, which marks them down to be cleaned out by the spleen.

The full journal article is available at PLOS Pathogens: cAMP-Signalling Regulates Gametocyte-Infected Erythrocyte Deformability Required for Malaria Parasite Transmission.

 
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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 23 2015, @11:33PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 23 2015, @11:33PM (#186998)

    Why is malaria present only in total shitholes?

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 23 2015, @11:37PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 23 2015, @11:37PM (#187000)

    I'll take my chances in South Korea or South Africa

    • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 23 2015, @11:47PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 23 2015, @11:47PM (#187005)

      South Korea was a pretty awful place for a long time. It was a warzone for many years, and then was governed by military dictatorships for a while. It didn't become what might be considered a democracy until the late 1980s. It's only within the past two decades that it has been something other than a shithole.

      South Africa? Well, when a nation makes Detroit look like a safe and friendly place with a well-developed economy and excellent infrastructure, "shithole" is a word that does come to mind.

      • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 24 2015, @12:55AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 24 2015, @12:55AM (#187025)

        South Korea is still an authoritarian shithole; it has ridiculous censorship and anti-privacy laws and the culture itself promotes authoritarianism.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 24 2015, @12:48PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 24 2015, @12:48PM (#187154)

          So its like the US?