Malari How It Affects Children

Malaria is a very contagious parasite transmitted through mosquitoes to humans. Those at risk are individuals living in areas conducive to the breeding of mosquitoes, especially those that allow the mosquitoes to complete their growth cycle. Everyone is at risk

Mosquitoes pass malaria to humans through their salivary glands. Once the parasites have entered the blood stream, they go to the liver. In the liver they mature and undergo reproduction, forming merozoites. These merozoites enter the blood stream and inject themselves into red blood cells. Once inside the blood cells, they reproduce rapidly and within forty-eight to seventy-two hours, the blood cell bursts, releasing hemoglobin into the blood stream. It is the destruction of these blood cells and the hemoglobin released into the blood stream that actually causes most of the symptoms.

Malaria is a serious and sometimes fatal disease caused by a parasite that commonly infects a certain type of mosquito which feeds on humans. People who get malaria are typically very sick with high fevers, shaking chills, and flu-like illness.. In 2015 an estimated 212 million cases of malaria occurred worldwide and 429,000 people died, mostly children in the African Region. Although malaria can be a deadly disease, illness and death from malaria can usually be prevented. In Malawi, malaria is very common because

The symptoms vary because patients are diagnosed with having either uncomplicated or severe malaria. This is due to the fact that different kinds of malaria range in severity. For instance, ,P. falciparum and P. knowlesi infections can cause rapidly progressive severe illness and lead to death death while the other species, P. malariae, P. vivax, or P. ovale are less likely to cause such severe manifestations. Furthermore, P. vivax and P. ovale infections also require treatment for the hypnozoite forms that remain dormant in the liver and can cause a relapsing infection. Finally, P. falciparum and P. vivax species have varying drug resistance patterns in different geographic regions. For P. falciparum and P. knowlesi infections, the urgent initiation of appropriate therapy is especially

Before the research I knew malaria is a disease which occurs mostly in poor, tropical and subtropical areas of the world. I also knew people get malaria by being bitten by an infective mosquito.

There have been many attempts at preventing malaria, none of which have been very successful. These have usually involved protecting human beings from mosquitoes, the dreaded carriers

In the United States, many diseases like the flu are treated easily by available drugs administered by pharmacies. However, in third world countries like Africa, medical supply is not affordable in environments festered with contaminated water supply and lack of food sources. Sub-Saharan Africa is plagued by many diseases, but the most common disease is Malaria. Malaria is a type of disease that is spread by the female mosquito of the genus Anopheles. An individual will start to experience high fevers and chills. If left untreated, the individual could possibly die (Heyneman, 2014). Antimalarial drugs are a type of treatment that can counteract this disease. Doxycycline is an antimalarial drug that is commonly used, however its

In the past decade at an alarming rate Malaria has been escalating, especially in Africa. In Africa alone Malaria cases account for 90% of the known cases in the world. There are an estimated 400 million cases of this disease each year which is said to cause 1.5 – 2.7 million deaths.

The illness associated with the malaria parasite was first thought to be a result of poisonous mists drifting from marshes hence its name meaning “bad air” in Italian. Of course it was unbeknownst back then that it was actually caused by the female anopheles mosquito which tends to live near still water such as marshes.2 Although it was unknown what actually caused the symptoms of malaria,

There are five types of mosquitos that can carry the disease; P. falciparum, P. Vivax, P. Ovale, P. Knowlesi, and P. Malariae (Marshall & Taylor, 2009). The two diseases that have the most focus are the P. vivax which is most widely contracted, and the P. Falciparum which is the most fatal (Center for Disease Control, 2017). The life cycle of the disease starts with the bite of a mosquito called the anopheles, which transmits the disease. While there are hundreds of different types of mosquitoes anopheles is the only one that carries the parasitic protozoa. The bite of a mosquito injects sporozoites into the blood stream where it travels quickly to the liver since they have a short life span (Frevert, 2004). Once at the liver it infects the liver cells and replicates itself to mature into schizonts which ruptures into merozoites. After replication the merozoites burst from the liver cells into the blood stream and begin to invade the erythrocytes (red blood cells), once in the erythrocytes they again replicate completely filling the cell until the parasite ruptures the erythrocytes and releases toxins and merozoites into the bloodstream. The parasites are then separated into gametocytes (male/female), where they are released by the blood stream as plasmodium which can be acquired from another anopheles mosquito by biting the human host to start the cycle

People infected with malaria often experience fever, chills, and flu-like illnesses and then they may develop severe complications and die if left untreated.

Malaria is found around the equator, mostly on the continent of Africa. 3.6 billion people live in Malaria exposed areas. That means about 50% of the population is exposed, while 300-400 million people get it every year. Malaria is a parasite, meaning it really isn’t a disease. Mosquitoes spread the Malaria parasite by biting an infected person. When they do that they take the blood containing the parasite, and the parasite then lives in it saliva. Then the next time the bite someone, the parasite then travels into its’ next host. Malaria can only thrive in areas that are warm because it has to live all year to be able to spread.

A febrile illness characterized by cyclic periods the length of which directly correlates to the parasite responsible; malaria is caused by five species of the genus Plasmodium, apicomplexan protozoa. These include P. falciparum, P. vivax, P. malariae, P. ovale and P. knowlesi. Of these, the first two noted are the most prevalent with falciparum malaria being the most severe (Lopez Del Prado et al., 2014). A vectorborne disease, malaria is transmitted

These symptoms include; fever, fatigue, vomiting, headaches. In some severe cases malaria has been known to cause yellowing of skin, learning disabilities, seizures, coma, and even death.

Period of protection of malaria is usually shorter than the 6 months quoted by research