THE malaria parasite actively encourages its mosquito host to binge on sugar, although no one knows why.
Heather Ferguson and Ana Rivero at the University of Edinburgh in the UK found that mosquitoes infected with the Plasmodium parasite that causes malaria in rodents changed their behaviour. The insects ate 50 per cent more glucose, and their hunger for sugar peaked when their gut contained the most oocytes, a stage in the parasite’s life cycle.
It is unclear whether the parasite or host benefits from the sugar binge (Proceedings of the Royal Society B, DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2003.2389).
