Models of Acquired Immunity to Malaria: A Review

Abstract

Malaria is a considerable health threat to almost half of the world's population, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. The socio-economic impact of malaria is so high that it measurably contributes to poverty and underdevelopment on national scales. Acquired immunity to malaria is thought to be influenced by many complex factors such as climate, use of intervention measures, population variation, parasite diversity, age and intensity of exposure. Acquired immunity is markedly known to increase with age, thus, infection duration may be expected to decrease as immunity rises. However, recent studies of infection duration with age found no general age trend. By so doing, the description of acquired immunity was simplified, reducing it to a single dimension, with no distinction between variant-specific and variant-transcending immune response and also ignoring decay of immunity. Hence, the need to explicitly interplay naturally acquired immunity with age in a biologically realistic way has been emphasized.