Plasmodium Gametocytes and Infectivity
Plasmodium gametocytes develop from asexual parasites and are the only parasite life-stage infective to mosquitoes. The likelihood of onward transmission to mosquitoes and the proportion of mosquitoes that are infected by a gametocyte carrier is positively associated with gametocyte density (Churcher et al. 2013; Da et al. 2015; Kiattibutr et al. 2017). In P. vivax, gametocyte generation begins early during infection with gametocytes appearing in the bloodstream 2–3 days after the first asexual parasites and typically disappearing within 3 days after asexual infections are cleared (Bousema and Drakeley 2011). As a consequence, P. vivax gametocyte density is strongly associated with total parasite density (Koepfli et al. 2015; McCarthy et al. 2013; Tadesse et al. 2018), and there is a strong positive association between total parasite density and the likelihood that mosquitoes become infected when feeding on an infected individual (Kiattibutr et...
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Ouédraogo, A.L., Bousema, T. (2018). Transmission-blocking Immunity in Malaria. In: Kremsner, P., Krishna, S. (eds) Encyclopedia of Malaria. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8757-9_147-1
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