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Malaria is the most important parasitic disease of man. It infects approximately 5% of the world’s population and kills somewhere between one and two million people each year. Of the four species of malaria parasites that infect humans, only <i>Plasmodium falciparum</i> is lethal. Cerebral involvement causing coma in severe falciparum malaria is a characteristic but ominous development carrying a 15–20% treated case fatality. Untreated it is considered uniformly fatal. Cerebral malaria is widely quoted as being the most common cause of coma in tropical areas of the world. <b>WHO GETS CEREBRAL MALARIA?</b> In some parts of the tropics malaria is acquired as many as two or three times every day and thus everyone in the community has malaria all the time. At the other end of the spectrum, there are many areas where the chances of acquiring malaria are relatively low. For example, along the western border of Thailand,
Evolutionary explanations of cooperative breeding based on kin selection have predicted that the individual contributions made by different helpers to rearing young should be correlated with their degree of kinship to the litter or brood they are raising. In the cooperative mongoose or meerkat, Suricata suricatta, helpers babysit pups at the natal burrow for the first month of pup life and frequent babysitters suffer substantial weight losses over the period of babysitting. Large differences in contributions exist between helpers, which are correlated with their age, sex and weight but not with their kinship to the young they are raising. Provision of food to some group members raises the contributions of individuals to babysitting. We discuss the implications of these results for evolutionary explanations of cooperative behaviour.
