Fish oil: new hope in fighting malaria.

Fish oil: New hope in fighting malaria

Malaria afflicts an estimated 500 million people worldwide, killing about 2.5 million of them annually. but a highly effective dietary treatment for routing the single-cell parasites that cause malaria may lie on the horizon.

The omega-3 fatty acids in fish oils are extremely susceptible to oxidative breakdown. antioxidants -- like vitamin E -- can protect these fatty acids, necessary for building cell membranes. In their new study, chemist Orville A. Levander with the USDA's Agricultural Research Service in Beltsville, Md., and microbiologist Arba L. Ager Jr., at the University of Miami's Center for Tropical Parasitic Diseases, fed mice a diet high in fish oils but containing no vitamin E. Their animals dined on the special diet one to four weeks before being inoculated with a malarial parasite -- either Plasmodium yoelii or P. berghei -- and for another 60 days afterward.

"The parasites multiply for a while. But by three or four weeks, the [mice on the special diet] are free of the," Ager says. Levander says he suspects the actual cause of death is a rupturing of the parasite's cell membrance or that of its red-blood-cell hosts. Infected red cells are more prone to rupture, he notes, because the parasites foster a number of the destructive oxidative reactions to which the diet leaves them vulnerable.

The researchers say they were particularly exiceted about the diet's devastation of P. berghei, a strain resistant to chloroquine, the most widely used antimalarial drug. However, they say this dietary therapy may prove even more effective when used in conjucntion with oxidizing drugs, such as the Chinese herbal remedy qinghaosu, now being explored as a malaria treatment by the World Health Organization.