Athens, Ga. — Trypanosomes are parasites responsible for many human and animal diseases, primarily in tropical climates. One disease these parasites cause, African sleeping sickness, results from the bite of infected tsetse flies, putting over 60 …
In a critical scene in the film remake of the classic 1960s TV series “The Fugitive,” actor Harrison Ford sheds his coat and replaces it with another. This simple deception allows him to escape detection by the swarm of police officers trailing him. The African trypanosome, a blood parasite that causes African sleeping sickness, is, like Ford’s character in the film, a fugitive that changes its “coat” each time the human immune system is about to nab it. Woven of 10 million copies of a single sugar-coated molecule called a glycoprotein, the trypanosome’s surface changes every few days by virtue of a switch that activates a new gene.
FROM THE TRENCHES: A consortium of scientists announced that it has deciphered the genetic code of the parasite that causes the deadliest form of Malaria, an illness that kills more than a million people a year in developing nations.