Malaria is kind of cool

So i've been working for a couple of weeks now so i thought i'd give an update on how it's going.

Yeah the malaria work is cool. The malaria i work with only infects rodents but as with human malaria uses 'ol Anopheles as the host. Not all malarial parasites use mosquitos though, or solely infect mammals. There is a chicken malaria and a pig malaria whose vector is a tick. But yeah, we are testing evolutionary theory through looking how the malaria changes it's gamete sex ratio in response to different environmental conditions. But there's other work too, like someone else is looking at the effect of drugs (i.e. the drugs don't work 100% so the malaria that's left is far more virulent). It's pretty cool but a bit slow going learning everything (mainly because not everyone has stuff for me to do at the moment).

I've been looking at blood smears though and can see the little malarial parasites hanging out in the red blood cells.

From Work Dec

From Work Dec

From Work Dec

Yep, i've been staring at those for a week now and counting the hundreds of malarial parasites. Pretty cool that you can see them though.

I also saw this graffiti written on the back of a toilet door at work. I found it rather funny.

From Work Dec