QUESTION

If I take paracetamol to help control my temperature will it affect my blood test results— can they fail to detect the plasmodium?

ANSWER

No—taking paracetamol (also called acetaminophen, and sold variously as Tylenol, Panadol and other brand names) is a good way to control your temperature during malaria infection, and it won’t affect your blood test results. If you haven’t done this already, if you think you have malaria you should go to a doctor or clinic to get a blood test for diagnosis. Once you have been positively diagnosed, you can be given appropriate treatment, probably one of a number of available artemisinin-based combination therapies (such as Coartem, Alu, Lonart, etc).