Malaria infection increases attractiveness of humans to mosquitoes.
Malaria infection increases attractiveness of humans to mosquitoes.
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DOI：
10.1371/journal.pbio.0030298
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发表时间：
2005-09
期刊：
影响因子：
9.8
通讯作者：
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
疟疾寄生虫是否增强了人类对寄生虫载体的吸引力？由于这种操纵将对疾病的流行病学产生重要影响，这个问题已经争论了多年。为了在半自然的情况下调查这个问题，我们分析了12组肯尼亚西部儿童对主要非洲疟疾媒介冈比亚按蚊的吸引力。在每组中，一名儿童未受感染，一名儿童自然感染了无性（非感染）阶段的恶性疟原虫，一名儿童携带了寄生虫的配子体（可传播给蚊子的阶段）。携带配子体的儿童吸引的蚊子数量是其他两类儿童的两倍。在对同样的儿童进行的第二次试验中，当寄生虫被抗疟疾治疗清除时，三类儿童之间的吸引力相似。特别是，那些先前携带配子体但现在已经清除了寄生虫的儿童并不比其他儿童更有吸引力。这排除了由于儿童对蚊子的不同内在吸引力而产生偏倚的可能性，并强烈表明配子体增加了儿童的吸引力。对肯尼亚儿童的一项研究表明，那些携带疟疾寄生虫的可传播配子体阶段的人对传播这种疾病的蚊子媒介更具吸引力。
Do malaria parasites enhance the attractiveness of humans to the parasite's vector? As such manipulation would have important implications for the epidemiology of the disease, the question has been debated for many years. To investigate the issue in a semi-natural situation, we assayed the attractiveness of 12 groups of three western Kenyan children to the main African malaria vector, the mosquito Anopheles gambiae. In each group, one child was uninfected, one was naturally infected with the asexual (non-infective) stage of Plasmodium falciparum, and one harboured the parasite's gametocytes (the stage transmissible to mosquitoes). The children harbouring gametocytes attracted about twice as many mosquitoes as the two other classes of children. In a second assay of the same children, when the parasites had been cleared with anti-malarial treatment, the attractiveness was similar between the three classes of children. In particular, the children who had previously harboured gametocytes, but had now cleared the parasite, were not more attractive than other children. This ruled out the possibility of a bias due to differential intrinsic attractiveness of the children to mosquitoes and strongly suggests that gametocytes increase the attractiveness of the children. A study of children in Kenya reveals that those individuals harboring the transmissible gametocyte stage of malaria parasites are more attractive to the mosquito vectors that spread this disease.