by Malaria Q&A
QUESTION:
Patient having malaria. Taking chloroquine. Then temp becomes normal but headache occurred. What to do?
ANSWER:
One of our collaborating medical doctors kindly assisted in answering this question. She suggests more clinical information is required; what type of malaria is the chloroquine being used for, for example? Also, the headache should not be from the drug, suggesting there is another cause which should be investigated.
by Malaria Q&A
QUESTION:
Patient is responding to malaria intravenous medicines but the blood test are not showing any strains of malaria parasites.
Is it possible it is malaria or some other disease?
ANSWER:
I’m afraid it is hard to answer this without more information regarding what steps have been taken to diagnose infection, what medication is being given, and what other clinical information is available. Intravenous medication for malaria is usually quinine or artesunate, and it is unlikely that any medical institution or practitioner would give these unless they had seen malaria on testing, as these agents are generally reserved for severe disease. Another thought is that they are using doxycycline, which is an antibiotice with a broader spectrum of use, and the patient’s improvement is due to the drug taking care of something else other than malaria (Babesia, Bartonella, Borrelia).
by Malaria Q&A
QUESTION:
What are the symptoms?
ANSWER:
Symptoms of malaria include fever and flu-like illness, including shaking chills, headache, muscle aches, and tiredness. Nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea may also occur. Malaria may cause anemia and jaundice (yellow coloring of the skin and eyes) because of the loss of red blood cells. Symptoms usually appear between 10 and 15 days after the mosquito bite. If not treated, malaria can quickly become life-threatening by disrupting the blood supply to vital organs. Infection with one type of malaria, Plasmodium falciparum, if not promptly treated, may cause kidney failure, seizures, mental confusion, coma, and death. In many parts of the world, the parasites have developed resistance to a number of malaria medicines.
by Malaria Q&A
QUESTION:
Can malaria be a cause for kidney failure or brain fever?
ANSWER:
Malaria, and specifically Plasmodium falciparum malaria, the most severe and deadly form of the disease, can certainly cause both renal failure and brain fever. It usually does this by infecting red blood cells, which then become blocked in tiny blood vessels deep within organs. This process is called sequestration. When sequestration happens in the brain, the effect can be so-called “cerebral malaria” or brain fever. In the kidney, this can result in kidney failure. Given these severe consequences, it is crucially important to seek diagnosis and then treatment immediately if you are concerned you might be suffering from malaria.
by Malaria Q&A
QUESTION:
What is pf and pv?
ANSWER:
“Pf” stands for Plasmodium falciparum and “Pv” stands for Plasmodium vivax. These are two different species of the parasite that causes malaria in humans. Pf causes the most acute, severe form of the disease, which can have a cerebral manifestation (“cerebral malaria”) and causes the most deaths worldwide. Pv is still a serious disease, but usually less severe. If diagnosed early, both forms are easily treated and completely curable.
by Malaria Q&A
QUESTION:
What is the origin of malaria?
ANSWER:
Malaria is caused by a single-celled parasite called Plasmodium; different species cause the different forms of malaria we see in different parts of the world. Malaria has been in existence for millions of years; it likely evolved from similar infections in other apes. Ancient people recognised the symptoms of malaria as early as 2700 BCE, when it was first described in a Chinese medical text. The ancient Romans, Greeks and Egyptians also knew about it, but it wasn’t until the 19th century when the causative agents were first seen in a patient’s blood by a French surgeon called Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran. A few years later, a British Army doctor called Ronald Ross first discovered that the parasites were transmitted via mosquitoes. He won the Nobel Prize for his work in 1902.
by Malaria Q&A
QUESTION:
Hi, my husband is an expat working in Mozambique for the past 5 years. He has been diagnosed with malaria 9 times, what are the long term effects of this and is he just unlucky or do others also get infected often? thanks.
ANSWER:
If the proper precautions are not taken, then it is very easy to get infected with malaria multiple times; I have one Ugandan colleague who claims he gets sick at least once a year from malaria, usually sometime in the rainy season. However, there are means to protect oneself from regular infection, and it might be that your husband could be more vigilant about such methods of prevention. For example, he should make sure he sleeps under a long-lasting insecticide treated bednet, which drastically reduced the risk of being bitten by mosquitoes at night. Similarly, he should try to wear long trousers and long-sleeved shirts, preferably impregnated with a substance called permethrin (an insecticide which prevents mosquitoes from biting through clothing – it can be purchased at most camping stores and sprayed directly onto clothing only, not onto skin), especially at dawn, dusk and at night, when malaria-carrying mosquitoes are most active. When mosquito numbers are high, he could also use insecticide that contains DEET on any exposed skin as a further precaution against bites.
The good news is that if his previous bouts of malaria have been uncomplicated, and diagnosed and treated quickly, there should be no long term effects of having had the infection.
by Malaria Q&A
QUESTION:
A pregnant woman has vivax malaria what treatment should be given in case of relapse?
ANSWER:
Primaquine, the usual drug given to prevent relapse of P. vivax malaria, is not recommended for pregnant women due to inadequate information about its safety. As such, it is normally recommended to treat the relapses with chloroquine, to cure each malarial episode, until after delivery of the child, after which time the woman should be treated with primaquine.
by Malaria Q&A
QUESTION:
What is malaria? How can it be controlled?
ANSWER:
Malaria is a disease caused by a single-celled parasite called Plasmodium. There are four species that regularly infect humans: P. falciparum (which causes the most severe form of the disease, and is responsible for 90% of the annual 700,000 fatalities caused by malaria, mainly in Africa), P. vivax, P. ovale and P. malariae. A fifth species, P. knowlesi, has recently also been reported in a small number of cases in south-east Asia, where prevalence appears to be increasing.
Despite it’s wide geographic range and potentially severe consequences, there are actually several effective strategies for controlling malaria, many of which have been successful of reducing the burden of the disease, and especially the number of deaths, in various regions. The first step towards control is prevention. This has largely been achieved through the distribution of long-lasting insecticide treated bednets, which prevent people from being bitten by infected mosquitoes as they sleep at night. While this has drastically reduced the number of cases of malaria in some settings, and particularly in certain high risk groups such as children under five and pregnant women, some worrying new data just was published which suggested that in high transmission zones, bednets may actually exacernate re-infection rates for older children and adults, and lead to insecticide resistance in mosquitoes. As such, while bednets clearly are still a key prevention strategy, their effect should be closely monitored.
Secondly, there is diagnosis and treatment. These go hand in hand, as they usually require the availability of health services or health professionals. If malaria infections are rapidly and accurately diagnosed, appropriate treatment can be swiftly given, preventing the progression of the disease and allowing the patient to recover. Appropriate administration of medication, as well as adherence to the full course of the drugs, can also help to prevent drug-resistance from emerging.
Finally, there are on-going research initiatives looking to find new ways to tackle malaria. For example, many scientists are involved in the search for a malaria vaccine, which, if safe, effective, and sufficiently cheap, could transform the way we think about fighting malaria. Similarly, due to the unfortunate circumstance of ever-increasing drug-resistance, particularly in Plasmodium falciparum, new types of medication are constantly being tested and trialled. The combination of all these efforts has managed to reduce the mortality of malaria greatly over the past few years; the aim now, espoused by organisations such as Malaria No More, is to get to a point where deaths from malaria are eliminated by the year 2015.
by Malaria Q&A
QUESTION:
My dad was infected with malaria,and his blood platelets were depleted to 35000. He was immediately admitted to hospital. Now after 5 days of being admitted, he is getting high fever around 102 degrees every morning and evening. His blood platelets have increased to 3lac and all other reports are normal. According to the doctor, the malaria is cured, but they are not able to detect the reason for periodical high fever…is such fever common after malaria? What might be the reason? Please help.
ANSWER:
One of our collaborating medical doctors has kindly assisted in providing this answer. Fever can be from co-infection with a second strain/type of malaria, or from the drug being used to treat the malaria. If his platelets were that low, then the likely type of malaria causing the infection would be Plasmodium falciparum, or a particularly heavy P. vivax burden, or infection with both. If he was/is in the hospital, other causes for fever could also be the IV line/another drug being given, complications such as pneumonia from being at bedrest or so ill, cholecystitis from not eating due to illness, DVT or blood clots in legs from immobility….there are many possibilities. More information would be needed to distinguish between these options.