An Impact Factor for Tropical Medicine and Infectious Disease

Tropical Medicine and Infectious Disease (TMID or TropicalMed) was established in 2016 [1] as the Official Publication of The Australasian College of Tropical Medicine [2] and published by the Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI) based in Switzerland and many other countries [3], being one of the oldest online publishers still existing after 25 years. It was founded with an international editorial board that continues to expand and organize under the leadership of A/Professor John Frean, Editor-in-Chief, from the National Institute for Communicable Diseases and Wits Research Institute for Malaria, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, and Professor Peter A Leggat, Deputy Editor-in-Chief, from James Cook University, Australia. It is indexed by all of the major indexing and abstracting services, including PubMed and Web of Science. Hence, it is tracked for impact factor and recently received its first one, a very creditable 3.711

COVID-19: Current Challenges and Future Perspectives.

[Extract] This article belongs to the Special Issue COVID-19: Current Challenges and Future Perspectives. At the time of submission for publication (7 January 2022), COVID-19, named by the World Health Organization (WHO) on 11 February 2020, had caused more than 296.5 million cases and over 5.5 million deaths with over 2.6 million new cases in the past 24 h [2]. The COVID-19 pandemic has greatly affected the capacity of health systems providing essential health care [1], but more than 9.195 billion vaccine doses have been administered as of 10 January 2021 [2]

COVID19: Current Challenges and Future Perspectives

This Special Issue focuses on recent global research on the current coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. The disease is caused by a novel virus, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV) named the virus SARS-CoV-2, as it is genetically related to the coronavirus responsible for the SARS outbreak of 2003. While related, the two viruses are quite different in their behaviour. At the time of submission for publication (7 January 2022), COVID-19, named by the World Health Organization (WHO) on 11 February 2020, had caused more than 296.5 million cases and over 5.5 million deaths with over 2.6 million new cases in the past 24 h. The COVID-19 pandemic has greatly affected the capacity of health systems providing essential health care, but more than 9.195 billion vaccine doses have been administered as of 10 January 2021. There have been 22 papers published upon peer review acceptance in this Special Issue, including one editorial, twelve research papers, three review papers and seven other papers, including one perspective, two case reports, one brief report, two viewpoints and one commentary. They each contribute to a much better understanding of COVID-19

Crowdsourcing malaria parasite quantification: an online game for analyzing images of infected thick blood smears

Background: There are 600,000 new malaria cases daily worldwide. The gold standard for estimating the parasite burden and the corresponding severity of the disease consists in manually counting the number of parasites in blood smears through a microscope, a process that can take more than 20 minutes of an expert microscopist’s time. Objective: This research tests the feasibility of a crowdsourced approach to malaria image analysis. In particular, we investigated whether anonymous volunteers with no prior experience would be able to count malaria parasites in digitized images of thick blood smears by playing a Web-based game. Methods: The experimental system consisted of a Web-based game where online volunteers were tasked with detecting parasites in digitized blood sample images coupled with a decision algorithm that combined the analyses from several players to produce an improved collective detection outcome. Data were collected through the MalariaSpot website. Random images of thick blood films containing Plasmodium falciparum at medium to low parasitemias, acquired by conventional optical microscopy, were presented to players. In the game, players had to find and tag as many parasites as possible in 1 minute. In the event that players found all the parasites present in the image, they were presented with a new image. In order to combine the choices of different players into a single crowd decision, we implemented an image processing pipeline and a quorum algorithm that judged a parasite tagged when a group of players agreed on its position. Results: Over 1 month, anonymous players from 95 countries played more than 12,000 games and generated a database of more than 270,000 clicks on the test images. Results revealed that combining 22 games from nonexpert players achieved a parasite counting accuracy higher than 99%. This performance could be obtained also by combining 13 games from players trained for 1 minute. Exhaustive computations measured the parasite counting accuracy for all players as a function of the number of games considered and the experience of the players. In addition, we propose a mathematical equation that accurately models the collective parasite counting performance. Conclusions: This research validates the online gaming approach for crowdsourced counting of malaria parasites in images of thick blood films. The findings support the conclusion that nonexperts are able to rapidly learn how to identify the typical features of malaria parasites in digitized thick blood samples and that combining the analyses of several users provides similar parasite counting accuracy rates as those of expert microscopists. This experiment illustrates the potential of the crowdsourced gaming approach for performing routine malaria parasite quantification, and more generally for solving biomedical image analysis problems, with future potential for telediagnosis related to global health challenges

Plasmodium ovale : a case of not-so-benign tertian malaria

Severe malaria is most commonly associated with Plasmodium falciparum. Plasmodium vivax is increasingly recognized as being capable of causing severe disease. In contrast, Plasmodium ovale is considered as a cause of benign disease and evidence supporting the occurrence of severe or complicated ovale infection is rare. This report describes a case of severe P. ovale infection in a patient presenting with jaundice, respiratory distress, severe thrombocytopenia, petechiae, and hypotension. He had no apparent underlying risk factors for severe disease.http://www.malariajournal.com/content/13/1/85am201

Management of uncomplicated malaria

The original publication is available at http://www.cmej.org.za/index.php/cmejThe key issues in the successful management of malaria are early and accurate diagnosis and urgent treatment with effective drugs. Disease presentation is, however, not specific – progression to complicated disease may be rapid in non-immune persons, particularly in young children and pregnant women, and parasite drug resistance significantly influences treatment outcome.Publishers' Versio

Multi-locus sequence analyses reveal a clonal L. borgpetersenii genotype in a heterogeneous invasive Rattus spp. community across the City of Johannesburg, South Africa

Funding Information: This study was made possible by a Royal Society for Tropical Medicine and Hygiene small grant (MM, Grant Number GR000556), by a Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) PhD studentship (MM, Grant Number BB/M010996/1) and by support from the Wellcome Trust (MM, Grant Number 216634/Z/19/Z) . Rodent genotyping was funded through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Cooperative Agreement (AB, Grant Number 5 NU2GGH001874-02-00) and a Facility Grant (UID78566) from the National Research Foundation of South Africa.Peer reviewedPublisher PD