Malaria

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reat the condition.
Causes & symptoms
Human malaria is caused by four different species of a parasite called plasmodium: Plasmodium falciparum (the most deadly), Plasmodium vivax, Plasmodium malariae, and Plasmodium ovale. The last two are fairly uncommon. Many animals can get malaria, but human malaria does not spread to animals. In turn, animal malaria does not spread to humans.
A person gets malaria when bitten by a female mosquito who is looking for a blood meal and is infected with the malaria parasite. The parasites enter the blood stream and travel to the liver, where they multiply. When they reemerge into the blood, symptoms appear. By the time a patient shows symptoms, the parasites have reproduced very rapidly, clogging blood vessels and rupturing blood cells.

Malaria cannot be casually transmitted directly from one person to another. Instead, a mosquito bites an infected person and then passes the infection on to the next human it bites. It is also possible to spread malaria via contaminated needles or in blood transfusions. This is why all blood donors are carefully screened with questionnaires for possible exposure to malaria.
The amount of time between the mosquito bite and the appearance of symptoms varies, depending on the strain of parasite involved. The incubation period is usually between eight and 12 days for falciparum malaria, but it can be as long as a month for the other types. Symptoms from some strains of P. vivax may not appear until eight to 10 months after the mosquito bite occurred.
The primary symptom of all types of malaria is the "malaria ague" (chills and fever), which corresponds to the "birth" of the new generation of the parasite. In most cases, the fever has three stages, beginning with uncontrollable shivering for an hour or two, followed by a rapid spike in temperature (as high as 106°F [41.4°C]), which lasts three to six hours. Then, just as suddenly, the patient begins to sweat profuse...