1 October 1981

To the Editor:

In the paper of Biggar, R. J., Collins, W. E., and Campbell, C. C., “The serological response to primary malaria infection in urban Ghanaian infants” (Am. J. Trop. Med. Hyg., 29: 720–724, 1980) the authors considered Accra as a mesoendemic place for malaria while stating that “… although no systematic study of the area has been undertaken since 1955,” they followed the serologic responses to malaria antigens in 31 children from birth through 15 months of age. From among these children 10 had shown seroconversion but no malaria appeared during the observation period.

They have probably not read the paper which appeared in 1976 in the American Journal of Human Genetics: “A new look at the protection of hemoglobin AS and AC genotypes against Plasmodium falciparum infection: A census tract approach” written by us. We report in this paper that in 1964, we investigated 4,097 children under 5 years of age in Accra, Ghana.