Malaria associated stillbirth and low birth weight in women with low protective immunity may result, at least in part, from a shortened gestation triggered by acute infection, stressing the importance of early malaria detection.
Background
Malaria still causes high morbidity and mortality around the world, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa. Community case management of malaria (CCMm) by community health workers (CHWs) is one of the strategies to combat the disease by increasing access to malaria treatment. Currently, the World Health Organization recommends to treat only confirmed malaria cases, rather than to give presumptive treatment.
CCMm is generally well executed by CHWs, but there are several barriers for its success. Integrated CCM may overcome some of these barriers.
These results warrant deeper monitoring of the RDT target antigen diversity and emphasize that development of other essential genes as a target for diagnostic tools is critical.
The performance of HRP-2 test in detecting asymptomatic carriers of P. falciparum varied by age and parasite density.
The primary risk factor for malaria infection in the low transmission district of Richard Toll is travel.
Both microscopy and RDTs performed suboptimally when compared to PCR. False negativity could be associated with the low parasite density profile of the samples
Improvements in communication between the health worker and patient, particularly to explain the capabilities of the test and management of RDT negative cases, may both manage patient expectations and promote patient demand for test-driven diagnoses.
The pLDH levels of P. vivax are the main explanation for the variations in the performance of pLDH-based RDTs.
Compared with RDTs, microscopy led to almost four out of five patients being over-diagnosed with malaria in this rural part of Tanzania.
Specificity of some malaria RDT products in HAT was surprisingly low, and constitutes a risk for misdiagnosis of a fatal but treatable infection.
