Malaria must be recognized promptly in order to treat the patient in time and to prevent further spread of infection in the community via local mosquitoes.
Malaria should be considered a potential medical emergency and should be treated accordingly. Delay in diagnosis and treatment is a leading cause of death in malaria patients in the United States.
Malaria can be suspected based on the patient's travel history, symptoms, and the physical findings at examination. However, for a definitive diagnosis to be made, laboratory tests must demonstrate the malaria parasites or their components.
Diagnosis of malaria can be difficult:
Where malaria is not endemic any more (such as in the United States), health-care providers may not be familiar with the disease. Clinicians seeing a malaria patient may forget to consider malaria among the potential diagnoses and not order the needed diagnostic tests. Laboratorians may lack experience with malaria and fail to detect parasites when examining blood smears under the microscope.
In some malaria-endemic areas, malaria transmission is so intense that a large proportion of the population is infected but not made ill by the parasites. Such carriers have developed just enough immunity to protect them from malarial illness but not from malarial infection. In that situation, finding malaria parasites in an ill person does not necessarily mean that the illness is caused by the parasites.
Clinical Diagnosis
Clinical diagnosis is based on the patient's symptoms and on physical findings at examination.
The first symptoms of malaria (most often fever, chills, sweats, headaches, muscle pains, nausea and vomiting) are often not specific and are also found in other diseases (such as the "flu" and common viral infections). Likewise, the physical findings are often not specific (elevated temperature, perspiration, tiredness).
In severe malaria (caused by Plasmodium falciparum), clinical findings (confusion, coma, neurologic...