Why is malaria caused from Plasmodium falciparum more harmful than any other species of Plasmodium?
I’m not a malaria expert, but I worked at SBRI where they have several groups working on malaria. Try their website: http://www.sbri.org/Home/ I also tried to find some papers that would distinguish the pathogenicty and virulence of Pf as compared to other species, but found it a longer search than I have time for just now. I did find that the var genes play a key role. Why the var genes of Pf are different from P. vivax, well I didn’t have time to run that down. Here is the article that I found: Mutually exclusive var gene expression in the malaria parasite: multiple layers of regulation, 2008. Cell, Trends in Parasitology Vol.24 No.10 Thanat Chookajorn, Patrath Ponsuwanna and Liwang Cui and here is what they say: “Malaria pathogenesis is an arms race between host immunity and parasite antigenic variation. The Plasmodium falciparum haploid genome contains a large family of 60 var genes that encode hypervariable P. falciparum eryth
