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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) by martyb on Sunday May 24 2015, @01:39AM

    by martyb (76) on Sunday May 24 2015, @01:39AM (#187039) Journal

    Like you, I had a problem with the name of the pharmaceutical. The headline reflects my attempt to get the story into the queue.

    I saw your note in the submission, but didn't understand what you meant until I saw Ethanol-Fueled's comment where he used a different spelling of the pharmaceuticals and explained it was to get past the spam filter. I thought it was an uncharacteristically short post for you and still couldn't figure out the reason for the brevity.

    So, I followed the link anyway and saw what I thought could be an interesting story. I tried to phrase the intro to make clear that you didn't write the whole thing and yet give you credit for the submission. Had I an e-mail address, I would have contacted you for clarification. Under the circumstances, I did the best I could at the time.

    Thanks for submitting the story and not giving up after running into the spam filter. (We had problems in the past with someone spamming stories with links to such items; hence the filter.)

    --
    Wit is intellect, dancing. I'm too old to act my age. Life is too important to take myself seriously.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 24 2015, @06:06AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 24 2015, @06:06AM (#187086)

    Yeah, I left it there thinking that an editor wouldn't have the big, aggressive defender to deal with and would kick it through the uprights.

    Things worked out as well as I could have anticipated, so I'm pretty much pleased.

    -- gewg_

    • (Score: 1) by martyb on Sunday May 24 2015, @05:04PM

      by martyb (76) on Sunday May 24 2015, @05:04PM (#187196) Journal

      Thanks for the confirmation — given the limited information available, it was a bit of a struggle!

      --
      Wit is intellect, dancing. I'm too old to act my age. Life is too important to take myself seriously.