Tropical Travel Trouble 007 Mega Malaria Extravaganza

LITFL • Life in the Fast Lane Medical Blog LITFL • Life in the Fast Lane Medical Blog - Emergency medicine and critical care medical education blog
aka Tropical Travel Trouble 007
When you think tropical medicine, malaria has to be near the top. It can be fairly complex and fortunately treatment has become a lot simpler. This post is designed to walk you through the basic principals with links to more in depth teaching if your niche is travel medicine, laboratory diagnostics or management of severe or cerebral malaria. If you stubbled on this post while drinking a cup of tea or sitting on the throne and want a few basic facts then skip to the end for a brief summary of the salient teaching points. As always do not hesitate to contact a specialist but hopefully armed with a little bit more knowledge.
Questions:
Q1. What is malaria and can you name the five types that infect humans?
Answer and interpretation
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Malaria is a protozoan parasite transmitted by the female anopheles mosquito. Like many vectors in tropical medicine it is the female who is responsible, they require blood meals in order to produce their eggs. Males feed exclusively on fruit. 
There are 5 types known to infect humans:

Plasmodium falciparum (most dangerous form and associated with death).
Plasmodium viva (causes relapsing fevers due to hypnozoites that hide in the liver).
Plasmodium ovale (causes ...

Source: Life in the Fast Lane - April 5, 2018 Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Neil Long Tags: Clinical Cases Tropical Medicine malaria Plasmodium plasmodium falciparum plasmodium knowles plasmodium malariae plasmodium ovale plasmodium vivax Source Type: blogs