malaria

—malarial, malarian, malarious, adj.

/meuh lair"ee euh/, n.

1. Pathol. any of a group of diseases, usually intermittent or remittent, characterized by attacks of chills, fever, and sweating: formerly supposed to be due to swamp exhalations but now known to be caused by a parasitic protozoan, which is transferred to the human bloodstream by a mosquito of the genus Anopheles and which occupies and destroys red blood cells.

2. Archaic. unwholesome or poisonous air.

[1730-40; < It, contr. of mala aria bad air]

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A serious relapsing infection caused by protozoa of the genus Plasmodium (see plasmodium), transmitted by the bite of the Anopheles mosquito.

Known since before the 5th century BC, it occurs in tropical and subtropical regions near swamps. The roles of the mosquito and the parasite were proved in the early 20th century. Annual cases worldwide are estimated at 250 million and deaths at 2 million. Malaria from different Plasmodium species differs in severity, mortality, and geographic distribution. The parasites have an extremely complex life cycle; in one stage they develop synchronously inside red blood cells. Their mass fissions at 48-or 72-hour intervals cause attacks lasting 4–10 hours. Shaking and chills are followed by fever of up to 105 °F (40.6 °C), with severe headache and then profuse sweating as temperature returns to normal. Patients often have anemia, spleen enlargement, and general weakness. Complications can be fatal. Malaria is diagnosed by detecting the parasites in blood. Quinine was long used to alleviate the fevers. Synthetic drugs, such as chloroquine, destroy the parasites in blood cells, but many strains are now resistant. Carriers of a gene for a hemoglobinopathy have natural resistance. Malaria prevention requires preventing mosquito bites: eliminating mosquito breeding places and using insecticides or natural predators, window screens, netting, and insect repellent. See also protozoal disease.

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▪ pathology

Introduction

 serious, relapsing infection in humans, characterized by periodic attacks of chills and fever, anemia, splenomegaly (enlargement of the spleen), and often fatal complications. It is caused by one-celled parasites of the genus Plasmodium that are transmitted to humans by the bite of mosquito (mosquito)es. Malaria can occur in temperate regions, but it is most common in the tropics and subtropics. In many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, entire populations are infected more or less constantly. Malaria is also common in Central America, the northern half of South America, and in South and Southeast Asia. The disease also occurs in countries bordering on the Mediterranean, in the Middle East, and in East Asia. In Europe, North America, and the developed countries of East Asia, malaria is still encountered in travelers arriving or returning from affected tropical zones. Annual cases of malaria worldwide are estimated at 250 million, with roughly 900,000 deaths resulting—most of them young children in Africa.

The course of the disease

 Malaria is actually four diseases caused by four related protozoan (single-celled) parasites: Plasmodium falciparum, P. vivax, P. ovale, and P. malariae. The most common is P. vivax; the deadliest is P. falciparum. The parasites are spread by the bite of infected female Anopheles mosquitoes, which feed on human blood in order to nourish their own eggs. While taking its meal (usually between dusk and dawn), an infected mosquito injects immature forms of the parasite, called sporozoites, into the person's bloodstream. The sporozoites are carried by the blood to the liver, where they mature into forms known as schizonts. Over the next one to two weeks each schizont multiplies into thousands of other forms known as merozoites. The merozoites break out of the liver and reenter the bloodstream, where they invade red blood cells, grow and divide further, and destroy the blood cells in the process. The interval between invasion of a blood cell and rupture of that cell by the next generation of merozoites is about 48 hours for P. falciparum, P. vivax, and P. ovale; in P. malariae the cycle is 72 hours long.

 Most merozoites reproduce asexually—that is, by making identical copies of themselves rather than by mixing the genetic material of their parents. A few, however, develop into a sexual stage known as a gametocyte. These will mate only when they enter the gut of another mosquito that bites the infected person. Mating between gametocytes produces embryonic forms called ookinetes; these embed themselves in the mosquito's gut, where they mature after 9 to 14 days into oocysts, which in turn break open and release thousands of sporozoites that migrate to the insect's salivary glands, ready to infect the next person in the cycle.

      Typically, victims who are bitten by malaria-carrying mosquitoes experience no symptoms until 10 to 28 days after infection. The first clinical signs may be any combination of chills, fever, headache, muscle ache, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and abdominal cramps. Chills and fever occur in periodic attacks; these last 4 to 10 hours and consist first of a stage of shaking and chills, then a stage of fever and severe headache, and finally a stage of profuse sweating during which the temperature drops back to normal. Between attacks the temperature may be normal or below normal. The classic attack cycles, recurring at intervals of 48 hours (in so-called tertian malaria) or 72 hours (quartan malaria), coincide with the synchronized release of each new generation of merozoites into the bloodstream. Often, however, a victim may be infected with different species of parasites at the same time or may have different generations of the same species being released out of synchrony—in which case the classic two- or three-day pattern may be replaced by more frequent rigours of chills, fever, and sweating. The parasites continue to multiply—unless the victim is treated with appropriate drugs or dies in the interim.

      Besides attacks, persons with malaria commonly have anemia (owing to the destruction of red blood cells by the parasites), enlargement of the spleen (the organ responsible for ridding the body of degenerate red blood cells), and general weakness and debility. Infections due to P. falciparum are by far the most dangerous. Victims of this “malignant tertian” form of the disease may deteriorate rapidly from mild symptoms to coma and death unless they are diagnosed and treated promptly and properly. The greater virulence of P. falciparum is associated with its tendency to infect a large proportion of the red blood cells; patients infected with that species will exhibit ten times the number of parasites per cubic millimetre of blood than patients infected with the other three malaria species. In addition, red blood cells infected with P. falciparum have a special tendency to adhere to the walls of the tiniest blood vessels, or capillaries (capillary). This results in obstruction of the blood flow in various organs, but the consequences are gravest when capillaries in the brain are affected, as they often are. It is this latter complication—known as cerebral malaria and manifested by confusion, convulsions, and coma—that frequently kills victims of P. falciparum malaria. Several strains of P. falciparum have developed that are resistant to some of the drugs used to treat or prevent malaria.

      Infections of P. vivax and P. ovale differ from the other two types of malaria in that some of the sporozoites may remain dormant in the liver in a “hypnozoite” stage for months or even years before emerging to attack red blood cells and cause a relapse of the disease.

Diagnosis and treatment

      If diagnosis is based on clinical symptoms alone, malaria may easily be confused with any of several other diseases. For example, an enlarged spleen can also sometimes be caused by other less-prevalent tropical infections such as schistosomiasis, kala-azar (a type of leishmaniasis), and typhoid fever. For this reason the most reliable method of diagnosis is a laboratory test in which a trained technician is able to distinguish between the four species of parasites when a smear of blood from the infected person is examined under a microscope. The method has drawbacks, however. For example, the test is time-consuming, may fail to detect cases where there are very few parasites, and relies on a laboratory and skilled staff. Therefore, symptoms will continue to be an important clue in detecting malaria, especially for people who live in rural areas that lack sophisticated laboratory facilities but also for international travelers. Most travelers will not develop symptoms until they return home to countries where malaria may not be endemic. This makes it vital that they recognize the possible early signs of infection themselves and tell their doctors where they have been. Otherwise, their illness may be dismissed as flu, with potentially fatal consequences. In some cases, malaria can kill within hours.

      An effective treatment for malaria was known long before the cause of the disease was understood: the bark of the Cinchona tree, whose most active principle, quinine, was used to alleviate malarial fevers as early as the 17th century. Quinine has been extracted from cultivated cinchona trees since the early 19th century. Despite a range of side effects such as tinnitus (ringing in the ears), blurred vision, and, less commonly, blood disorders and various allergic reactions, it is still used, especially for severe malaria and in cases in which the parasites are resistant to other, newer drugs. Chief among these newer drugs are chloroquine, a combination of pyrimethamine and sulfadoxine, mefloquine, primaquine, and artemisinin—the latter a derivative of Artemisia annua, a type of wormwood whose dried leaves have been used against malarial fevers since ancient times in China. All of these drugs destroy the malarial parasites while they are living inside red blood cells. For the treatment of malignant or cerebral malaria, the antimalarial drug must be given intravenously without delay, and measures are taken to restore the red blood cell level, to correct the severe upset of the body's fluids and electrolytes, and to get rid of urea that accumulates in the blood when the kidneys fail.

      In their initial decades of use, chloroquine and related drugs could relieve symptoms of an attack that had already started, prevent attacks altogether, and even wipe out the plasmodial infection entirely. By the late 20th century, however, some strains of P. vivax as well as most strains of P. falciparum had become resistant to the drugs, which were thus rendered ineffective. As a result, the incidence of malaria began to increase after having steadily declined for decades.

      Unlike some infectious diseases, infection with malaria induces the human body to develop immunity very slowly. Unprotected children in tropical countries acquire sufficient immunity to suppress clinical attacks only after many months or a few years of constant exposure to Plasmodium parasites by hungry mosquitoes. Even then, the immunity is effective only against the specific parasite to which the child has been exposed, and the immunity wanes after several months if the child is removed from constant exposure. One interesting group that shows unusual resistance to malaria are carriers of a gene for the sickle-cell trait (see sickle cell anemia). Apparently infection of the red blood cells induces the sickling effect, and the cells are destroyed along with the parasites.

      International efforts have been under way for decades to produce a vaccine, so far without success. In order to immunize against Plasmodium, a different response must be elicited from the immune system at each of the parasites' different life-cycle stages. Moreover, the parasites' surface proteins change rapidly, so that a vaccine based on a particular “cocktail” of proteins might not necessarily protect against all forms of the parasite that the immunized person might encounter. Still, work continues on vaccines that would aim to limit or completely prevent infection by parasites by stimulating the production of antibodies (antibody) to specific surface proteins. Another strategy is to develop an “antidisease” vaccine, which would block not the infection itself but rather the immune system's responses to infection, which are responsible for many of the harmful symptoms. A third approach, known as the “altruistic” vaccine, would not stop either infection or symptoms but would prevent infection from spreading to others by blocking the ability of the parasites to reproduce in the gut of the mosquito.

      While the world awaits a vaccine, the mainstay of prevention in much of Africa and Southeast Asia is the bednet treated with insecticide. For travelers to malarious regions, essential equipment in addition to a bednet would include a spray-on or roll-on insecticide such as diethyl toluamide. Travelers should also take antimalarial drugs prophylactically, though none is completely effective against the parasites. The most comprehensive method of prevention is to eliminate the breeding places of Anopheles mosquitoes by draining and filling marshes, swamps, stagnant pools, and other large or small bodies of standing freshwater. insecticides have proved potent in controlling mosquito populations in affected areas.

      In 2008 scientists reported the discovery of a group of proteins synthesized by Plasmodium that mediate the parasite's ability to make human red blood cells “sticky.” Stickiness causes the infected human cells to adhere to the walls of blood vessels, allowing the parasite to evade transport to the spleen and hence destruction by the host's immune system. Scientists found that blocking the synthesis of one of the proteins involved in mediating this adherence process renders the parasite susceptible to elimination by the host's immune system. These adherence proteins represent possible targets for the development of novel antimalarial drugs.

Malaria through history

      The human race has suffered from malaria since earliest times. The parasites are thought to have evolved in tropical Africa from 2.5 million years ago (in the case of P. falciparum) to 30 million years ago (in the case of P. vivax, P. ovale, and P. malariae). The relatively recent appearance of P. falciparum may help to explain the greater virulence of that species.

      In ancient Egypt (Egypt, ancient) malaria probably occurred in lowland areas; the enlarged spleens of some Egyptian mummies are surviving traces of its presence. In ancient Greece (ancient Greek civilization), where it appeared annually as an autumnal fever, the disease was described by Hippocrates and others. Recent authors have surmised that the malaria found in Greece in those times was probably caused by P. vivax and P. malariae. By the later classical period of the Roman Empire (ancient Rome), however, malaria was a much more serious disease than it had previously been in the lands along the north shore of the Mediterranean Sea, and the association of malaria with the Pontine Marshes of the Roman Campagna (Campagna di Roma) was well established. Modern malariologists have attributed this increase in the severity of malaria to ecological changes associated with deforestation that had accompanied intensified agricultural activities—changes that allowed new species of mosquitoes from North Africa to be introduced and successfully established in southern Europe. Two of the introduced species were better transmitters of P. falciparum than any of the native European insects.

       Alexander the Great, whose death on the banks of the Euphrates River in June 323 BC was attributed to malaria, shared that fate with numerous illustrious victims. In the Italian peninsula, malaria killed Pope Innocent III as he was preparing to lead a crusade to the Holy Land in 1216, the poet Dante Alighieri (Dante) in 1321, and Pope Leo X in 1521. The artist Raphael, who painted a famous portrait of Leo X, also died of malaria (in 1520). Thirty-eight years later the former Holy Roman emperor Charles V reportedly succumbed to the disease in Spain.

      Malarial fevers were associated with swamps and marshes as early as classical Greece, but the role of mosquitoes in transmitting the infection was completely unknown. Many of the early Greeks thought the disease was contracted by drinking swamp water; later, because the Romans attributed it to breathing “miasmas,” or vapours, arising from bodies of stagnant water, the disease came to be called mal aria, or “bad air.” Since early Greek times, attempts were made to control malaria by draining swamps and stagnant marshes, but a specific treatment for the disease did not become available in Europe until the 1630s, when bark of the Cinchona tree was introduced into Spain from Peru. The skillful use of “Peruvian bark” by the great English physician Thomas Sydenham (Sydenham, Thomas) helped to separate malaria from other fevers and served as one of the first practices of specific drug therapy. The lifesaving drug became much more widely available by the mid-19th century, after the active ingredient of cinchona, quinine, was successfully isolated and the Dutch began to cultivate the cinchona tree in plantations on the island of Java.

      Following the introduction of cinchona bark, no comparably significant advance in the understanding of malaria or its control came until after the 1870s, when pioneering studies by Louis Pasteur (Pasteur, Louis) in France and Robert Koch (Koch, Robert) in Germany laid the foundations of modern microbiology. In November 1880 Alphonse Laveran (Laveran, Alphonse), a French military physician working in Algeria, showed that the elements seen in red blood cells of certain patients were parasites responsible for their hosts' malaria. Laveran won a Nobel Prize in 1907 in part for this discovery. In August 1897, in India, British bacteriologist Ronald Ross (Ross, Sir Ronald) discovered parasites of a malaria of birds in the stomach of a Culex mosquito, and in 1898, in Rome, Giovanni Grassi and his colleagues discovered a parasite of human malaria in an Anopheles mosquito. A bitter controversy that ensued between Ross and Grassi and their respective partisans over priority of discovery was one of the most vitriolic public quarrels in modern science. (Ross was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1902.)

      Immediately following the discovery that mosquitoes were the vectors for transmitting malaria to humans, William C. Gorgas (Gorgas, William Crawford), an American army surgeon, led two campaigns of mosquito reduction using sanitary measures (drainage and larviciding) in Cuba and Panama. Gorgas's campaign made the U.S. construction of the Panama Canal possible. It also made the killing of mosquito larvae by spreading oil on their breeding sites another widely accepted means of controlling the disease. In 1939–40 Fred Soper of the Rockefeller Foundation led a vigorous effort in Brazil that eradicated the Anopheles gambiae mosquito, using a dust larvicide (Paris green) against the larvae and a newly discovered insecticide ( pyrethrum) against the adult insects. The entire antimalarial effort was given an enormous boost in 1939 when the Swiss chemist Paul Müller (Müller, Paul Hermann) discovered the insecticidal properties of DDT. (Müller received a Nobel Prize in 1948 for his work.) After a six-year campaign (1946–51) of spraying DDT in Sardinia, malaria virtually disappeared from that Mediterranean island. Similar success was achieved in Greece, and with that, public health officials began to contemplate the possible eradication of malaria from the globe.

      Even as these multiple methods of attacking the mosquito vector were being improved, direct means of attacking the parasite itself were also refined. chloroquine, the mainstay of modern antimalarial drugs, was first synthesized in Germany in 1934, and pyrimethamine was synthesized in the United States during World War II (1939–45) by a team that included future Nobel laureates George H. Hitchings (Hitchings, George Herbert) and Gertrude B. Elion (Elion, Gertrude B.). The value of the synthetic antimalarials was heightened for the wartime Allies after Japan seized Java, where the Dutch cinchona plantations were the main source of quinine. Because the synthetics were cheaper, more plentiful, and caused fewer side effects than the natural products from bark, they too raised hopes after the war of winning a global campaign against malaria.

      In 1955 the World Health Organization (WHO) inaugurated its Global Malaria Eradication Campaign, to be based mainly on the spraying of insecticide in designated “malarious areas” of the world. The program resulted in the elimination of endemic malaria from Europe, Australia, and other developed areas and in a radical reduction of cases in less-developed countries such as India. However, by 1969 WHO was forced to abandon its dream of complete eradication. Species of Anopheles mosquitoes had quickly developed resistance to DDT, and the insecticide itself fell out of favour owing to its cost and ecological effects. More disturbing was the appearance of drug-resistant strains of Plasmodium. The first chloroquine-resistant parasites emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s in Asia and Latin America, and soon almost no country with endemic malaria was without drug-resistant parasites. In the late 1990s and early 2000s partnership-based aid programs, such as the Multilateral Initiative on Malaria and the Malaria Vaccine Initiative, were established to support the fight against malaria. Some of these programs aim to fund a broad range of malaria research, whereas others aim to fund ongoing malaria control efforts in endemic areas. These control efforts, which are the focus of antimalarial strategies established by the WHO, include the dissemination of insecticide-treated netting, the provision of prophylactic drugs to pregnant women, and earlier and more effective treatment of clinical cases, preferably through the use of multidrug “combination therapy” in order to attack drug-resistant parasites.

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