Malaria Migrated Out of Africa Along with Humans

For a long time it was considered that infection with parasites that cause malaria would be an acquisition, recent, dating back 10,000. But newer research shows that malaria accompanies people much more time and that has spread through the world with the human species.

When the man appeared in the African species, the migration started to pour continents, from the 60,000 to 80,000 years, and it took about disease, according to a genetic study conducted at the Institute for Medical Research in Melbourne Walter and Eliza Hall, Australia.

Or researchers analyzed over 500 samples of blood from people infected with Plasmodium falciparum (a species of microscopic parasites that cause malaria) located in nine countries in sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, Oceania and South America.

Determining the extent of genetic variation in the parasite genome in different regions of the world, scientists have concluded that humans and parasites have evolved together and were able to establish routes that spread malaria throughout the world.

Their disease has apparently originated in central Africa, and from here it spread in Asia and Oceania, as Homo sapiens colonizing these regions.

Initially, the disease could not get in America because the parasite does not survive at low temperatures so that malaria could not cross the Bering Straits, from Siberia to Alaska, as did the first people to colonize North America.

The disease has reached yet, and on this continent, much later, between the centuries XVI and XIX century, because of the trade in slaves brought from Africa.

Scientists believe that a better understanding of how that occurred and spread malaria parasite may help overcome resistance to drugs and to create a vaccine against this disease transmitted by mosquitoes and which is annually one million victims .