“Reducing the incidence of malaria could also drastically reduce the number of deaths from bacterial infections among children in Africa, a study” published last week in the Lancet found, according to SciDev.Net. “‘Children who are protected from malaria are less likely to catch bacterial infections. It therefore means that controlling malaria will give an additional benefit,’ Anthony Scott, the lead author and a researcher at the KEMRI-Wellcome Trust Research Programme, in Kenya, told SciDev.Net.”

The study also “found that children with a single copy of the sickle cell gene, which offers protection against malaria, are also protected against bacterial infections,” SciDev.Net writes, adding that the researchers “did not know why those children were protected — because of the gene itself or just the fact that those children did not get malaria” (Zorlu, 9/9).