The Immunoglobulins in Parasitic Diseases

The characteristic hypergammaglobulinemia of tropical and subtropical populations have been chiefly ascribed to malarial infection up until the 1950 s quantitation of the y-globulin in the serum of patients was wholly by the electrophoretic method, which does not separate the y-globulin into its different immunoglobulin components (D5, T2). 

It is now clear that fluorescent antibody to malaria persists for years after the patent malaria infestation has long disappeared, and malaria antibodies were still detectable in some West Africans after they had been in Britain for up to seven years (K5, V4). 

In a longitudinal study of experimentally induced malarial infection in rodents, the serum IgM made a relatively higher contribution early in infection, but both IgG and IgM malarial antibody persisted throughout the period of study for 2 months (C20). 

In areas where malaria is hyper- or holoendemic, newborn infants had high titers of malarial antibody which decreased during the first 6 months of life and then showed a gradual rise throughout childhood until adult levels were attained. The pattern of the malarial fluorescent antibody titer in children in a malaria endemic area, reflected the development of the serum IgG more closely than that of any other immunoglobulins, and the early fall in the titer of the malaria fluorescent antibody coincided with that of the loss of maternal IgG from the children s circulation, implying that malarial antibody is quite capable of traversing the human placenta (M13) (Table 6, Fig. 6). 

Studies on a much larger population of Gambian children confirmed 

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