As malaria maintains its status as the world s number 1 disease, researchers look for ever more ingenious ways to cripple the killer parasite. It s something we know little about. At Boston s Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research David Schneider is turning a lifelong love affair with bugs towards investigating their immune system. He hopes that will tell him how the malaria parasite slips through what s usually a very effective defence system. They try hard because they live in places where there are a lot of bacteria, so they have to be able to survive.
Cockroaches are still filthy though.
Where the human immune response relies largely on remembering past microbial attacks, insects only have time to shoot on sight. So an insect a fruit fly takes two weeks to go from an egg until it's a fertile female that can lay another egg. And bacteria takes about 20 minutes to divide, so if you look at a race the bacteria is always going away. So even a short-lived insect has to be able to have an immune system. David s lab has found that when they inject fruit flies with harmful bacteria the insects can usually destroy them quickly using modified blood cells called macrophages.