Immunity to asexual blood stages of Plasmodium: is resistance to acute malaria adaptive or innate?

Current models of immunity to blood stages of Plasmodium invoke a primary role for T-cell dependent processes and much recent evidence implicates Th1-type responses as crucial to the control of acute malaria. But do these data stand up to close scrutiny? Here, Andy Fell and Nick Smith review recent data from rodent and human studies and suggest that Th1-type responses may not after all be important in controlling malaria infection in the blood.