HIV Heightens Malaria Risk
As if African nations didn’t have enough problems to worry about, a recent study published in the British medical magazine The Lancet confirms that HIV positive individuals are much more likely to contract Malaria than those not infected with the virus. After monitoring both HIV positive and non-HIV positive people in Uganda, researchers found the HIV-positive patients were almost twice as likely to be infected with malaria. This make sense since the diminished immune system of HIV patients makes them more susceptible to other diseases such as tuberculosis.
Given the continuing high rates of HIV infection Africa, which shows no hint of slowing down, this could be a huge public health disaster. Already about 2 million people worldwide die from malaria, and if HIV makes it easier for the malaria parasite to infect a person, those numbers could increase dramatically even with HIV treatment, further straining limited health care resources in African nations.
Source:
AIDS compound malaria problem. The BBC, September 22, 2000.
The HIV Heightens Malaria Risk by Brian Carnell, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
Tags: Malaria