Malaria Symptoms

Malaria: Introduction

Malaria is caused by the Plasmodium parasite. An infectious disease, it spreads from the bite of infected female Anopheles mosquito. The malarial parasites make an entry into your bloodstream through a mosquito bite and travel quickly to your liver where they breed and multiply.

What are the Malaria Symptoms?

The symptoms can mimic those of a flu infection, or they may be more striking. Signs of malaria are very similar to those occurring during flu infection.

An increase of Plasmodium parasites in your bloodstream aggravates the symptoms. Malaria signs and symptoms generally appear within one to three weeks of an infected Anopheles mosquito bite.

Commonly experienced symptoms for malaria:

• Headache
• Sweats
• Fever
• Cough
• Body ache
• Muscle ache
• Tiredness
• Chills
• Rigor
• Shakes
• Nausea
• Vomiting
• Abdominal pain
• Mild jaundice

Some parasites can remain dormant in your liver and reactivate causing a second infection. Such type of recurrence is known as a malaria relapse. This is because some parasites stay back and multiply in your liver to populate and continue damaging RBC (red blood cells).

In absence of timely treatment, malaria can be life threatening, (especially Plasmodium falciparum). Nonetheless, symptoms of malaria can also come in phases and can vary.

This is proportional to parasite population in your bloodstream as they die and decrease, or multiply and increase. This is a characteristic cyclical pattern of malaria symptoms.