Malaria parasites can hide in people’s bodies for years or even decades without causing symptoms by shutting down the genes that make them visible to the immune system, a new report found.

This discovery explains how people can remain infected years after developing malaria and spread the disease through mosquitos that bite them, said Kirk W. Deitsch, PhD, professor with the Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Weill Medical College of Cornell University, New York City, and co-author of a study published in Nature Microbiology .

“What’s probably happening in a place like Africa, where there’s a lot of malaria transmission, is that people we thought didn’t have malaria actually had these invisible parasites at really low levels in their system,” Deitsch told Medscape Medical Ne

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