Will malaria vaccines last?
RTS,S and newer candidates need durability and coverage data, not victory parades.
Malaria vaccines are a start, not a finish. Drug resistance in Plasmodium and Trypanosoma remains a moving target.
Meanwhile environmental DNA keeps finding new microbial eukaryotes that will never enter a clinic.
Open questions
How do we treat neglected trypanosomes?
Sleeping sickness and Chagas still need safer drugs and political attention.
What is the real protozoan map?
The word hides many kingdoms. Classroom grades and clinic names will keep diverging.
Which free-living amoebae matter?
Naegleria cases are rare and tragic. Risk communication must stay proportional.
Can we watch soil protozoa better?
They regulate bacteria, yet sequencing still undercounts morphospecies ecologists know.
The frontier is public health and phylogeny — not how to culture a parasite at home.
Keep exploring
More in Tree of microbes
Bacteria
Single-celled prokaryotes with cell walls ? the oldest widespread life form, and both partners and pathogens.
Familiarity 95Viruses
Packets of DNA or RNA that are not cells — they replicate only inside living hosts.
Familiarity 96Fungi
A eukaryotic kingdom of yeasts, moulds and mushrooms — chitin walls, external digestion, partners of plants.
Familiarity 80Archaea
A prokaryotic domain that is not bacteria — methanogens, extremophiles and no known human pathogens.
Familiarity 35Bacteriophages
Viruses that infect bacteria — Earth's most abundant biological entities, and a concept-level idea in medicine.
Familiarity 42