Healthy Living and Fitness

Illness Care: Malaria

Symptoms

The period between the mosquito bite and the onset of the malarial illness is usually 1-3 weeks (7 to 21 days). However, the incubation period may be longer when a person has taken an inadequate course of malaria prevention medications. Symptoms may be less severe in someone who is partially immune or has been taking malaria medication. Certain types of malaria parasites as long as 8 to 10 months to cause symptoms. The life-threatening falciparum form always develops within three months. This means that most tourists spending two weeks in an area affected by malaria could become ill after returning home but the risk of life-threatening illness ceases after three months. Symptoms include:

• High fever (up to 105 degrees Fahrenheit or 40.6 degrees Celsius), with shaking chills
• Profuse sweating when the fever suddenly drops
• Fatigue
• Headache
• Muscle aches
• Malaise (a general feeling of sickness)
• Abdominal discomfort
• Nausea, vomiting
• Orthostatic hypotension (feeling faint when you stand up or sit up quickly).

In some patients the fever takes on a pattern of regular attacks once every day or every two days, with a characteristic progression from shaking chills (called rigors) through an increasing feeling of heat to profuse sweating followed by a fall in temperature back to normal.

In addition, patients with falciparum malaria (infection with the P. falciparum species) may have other severe symptoms:

• Brain involvement, which may produce extreme sleepiness, delirium, unconsciousness, convulsions and coma
• Pulmonary oedema, a dangerous accumulation of fluid inside the lungs that interferes with breathing
• Kidney failure
• Liver failure
• Bleeding problems, including small haemorrhages on the skin and mucous membranes.

The outcome of falciparum malaria can be death.

 

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