Malaria Movies

Under the microscope, blood from a victim of malaria is as vivid as a southern sunset. In mild malaria, the red blood cells appear speckled with pink. In violent forms of the disease, the corpuscles darken to dusky copper, mottled with purple. These changing hues show the progress of the fight between invading malarial parasites and the body's defending blood cells.

With a special quartz red light. Dr. Melvin H. Knisely of the University of Chicago (on loan to the University of Tennessee) has taken colored movies of the Battle of Malaria. This week, at the Louisville meeting of the Southern Medical Association, Dr. Knisely showed his movies--the first ever taken of disease in a living bloodstream. For his stars Dr. Knisely had chosen five malarial monkeys. He anesthetized them, exposed their abdominal cavities. Through the microscope's eyepiece he photographed the changes in the tiny blood vessels on the abdominal lining.

Malaria is caused by an amebalike parasite of the genus Plasmodium. The parasite, which enters man's bloodstream through a mosquito bite, often destroys over a million red blood corpuscles per cubic millimetre in one bout of malaria.

First the plasmodia enter the oxygen-bearing red blood cells. From the liquid part of the blood oozes a sticky jelly which clumps all the cells together. These clumps are gobbled down by white blood corpuscles. If the white cells are strong enough, the body wins.

But as the battle rages, the white cells may be outnumbered. The linings of blood vessels become sticky, and white cells cling to them like flies to fly paper. As the red clumps grow larger, the liquid part of the blood turns thick and sludgy, and the heart is harder and harder put to it to pump against the blockade. When circulation stagnates, the body's oxygen is cut off. and finally the heart stops.

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