• Question: Do you know someone what might have died from malaria ?

    Asked by anon-253698 to Sophie on 7 May 2020.
    • Photo: Sophie Adjalley

      Sophie Adjalley answered on 7 May 2020:

      Hi Ruby,
      many thanks for your question!
      Fortunately, I personnally do not, although I know many people, who have had malaria before and survived! And many famous people such as Gengis Khan,Julius Cesar, Tutankhamun, Abraham Lincoln or more recently Cheryl Cole had malaria!
      What is important to note is that nowadays most deaths from malaria occur in children younger than 5 years old or in immunocompromised individuals, who have a poor immune-system often because they have other medical conditions.
      In addition to malaria affecting young children, pregnant women are at a higher risk of developing severe symptoms and presence of malaria parasites in the placenta can endanger both pregnant woman and foetus.
      Hope this answers your question.

Comments

  • Photo: Alena

    Alena commented on :

    My early work in the malaria field was when I was starting my career in Venezuela, which, as a tropical country has endemic regions for malaria, where infection is very common. I knew personally several people who had had malaria and one of them sadly passed away due to the disease. It was partly caused by the difficult situation in the country because while in the country side people are used to malaria, in the cities it is not a common disease so diagnosis is not straight forward. When infection is severe, any delay in diagnosis and therefore treatment makes a life and death difference.
    However, the saddest case I ever came across was that of a 6 year old girl who died of post-transfutional malaria. This means she received contaminated blood during surgery.This is a huge problem because the lower the infection or number of parasites in the blood, the more difficult it is to detect them and at the time we didn’t have the tools we have today, but even with the most sensitive methods we have at the moment, some blood samples can still slip through. Obviously, a patient going through surgery is weakened overall and the immune system is also not very strong so chances are very grim in face of an infection like this.
    This is why there is such intense international effort to find better diagnostic methods, new drugs and hopefully a vaccine one day.