mosquitos bit me on the exposed arm, but it did not hurt and I have no marks
I got it from the Malaria Clinical Trials Center at Seattle Biomed. I am participating in a clinical trial which is measuring change of the immune response in the liver for a person who gets malaria several times after never having had it before. I had never before had malaria and I met other inclusion criteria, so I joined the study.
I will be in this study for a few months and I will post more details as time goes on. For now let me describe the process. There ought not be any symptoms for my having malaria; I will be clinically positive but cured before I become symptomatic. A week before meeting the mosquitoes I started taking chloroquine, which has been a standard drug for treating and preventing malaria since the 1940s. Malaria is a disease caused by a protist called a Plasmodium. This protist has several life cycles, including living in a mosquito in one form, in the human liver in another form, and then from the liver into the human blood stream in another form. Each form is as different from others as a caterpillar is from a butterfly.
there is a cup full of malaria-infected mosquitoes under the towel and they are biting me
The chloroquine stops the protist from transferring from my liver to my blood, so right now, the malaria in my liver is unaffected except that it has nowhere to go. My liver is attacking the malaria and learning how to kill it there. After a week I will take primaquine, which targets malaria in the liver but does not affect malaria in the blood. With both of those in me, the malaria will die. In addition to that eventually I will take Malarone, which is a combination of other drugs which also targets malaria everywhere. So in the end I will have no malaria.
Malaria kills many people worldwide and researchers need human subjects from which to learn about the diseases and to test treatments. I encourage all people to support local research in any way they can to improve the lives of others and make the world a better place for everyone.