Érika Martins Braga

TL;DR: The phylogeny using the CS gene supports the proposal that the human malaria P. falciparum is significantly more related to avian parasites than to other parasites infecting mammals, although the biology of sporozoite invasion is different between the avian and mammalian species.

TL;DR: The findings point to the importance of the neotropical region (southeast Brazil) as a major reservoir of new haemosporidian lineages and areas with high bird richness also have high parasite richness, as well as the need to characterize the lineage diversity of Plasmodium and Haemoproteus in bird communities.

TL;DR: It is demonstrated that patients with acute P. vivax infection presented a significant augmentation of circulating Tregs producing anti-inflammatory as well as pro-inflammatory cytokines, which was further positively correlated with parasite burden.

TL;DR: Although the blood preserved as thick blood smears provides an alternative and useful tool for malaria molecular diagnosis, its relatively poor performance at low level parasitemias impairs the correct determination of malaria prevalence in epidemiological studies, but the results obtained confirm that the use of filter-paper to collect blood is useful for field studies.

TL;DR: The need of the development or use of a more accurate diagnosis method to distinguish between P. malariae and P. vivax is pointed to, which is particularly important in view of the fact that the choice of drug for the antimalarial therapy depends on the parasite species.