P Vivax Vs P. Ovale

; they can transmit malaria from person to person. Most people are at high risk to develop malaria, especially, with p. falciparum type of infection, pregnant woman, people with HIV, infants and children under the age of five years due to the decreased immunity in their body. P. vivax is one of plasmodium strains that have a dormant liver stage and it can activate and invade the blood after months or years, causing many patients to relapse. A malarial parasite that is exclusive to humans is P. malariae; this parasite can result in quartan fever and a chronic infection that can last a lifetime for some patients if not treated. P. ovale is biologically and morphologically similar to P. vivax and both of them cause a tertian malaria, however,
ovale more prevalent in most of Africa than P. vivax. Malaria disease has several symptoms. In the early stage of the infection, patient may suffer from undifferentiated symptoms which appear from seven to nine days after being bitten, these symptoms include fever, headache, chills, abdominal pain and vomiting, thus making it difficult to recognize these symptoms as malaria at an early stage. Despite that, patients should receive treatment within 24 hours to prevent the progression of the disease and death. When an infected mosquito bites a human host, the parasite enters the bloodstream and stays in a dormant state within the liver. After five to six days, no symptoms of the disease will be present, however, the parasite will start to
The primary reason for death is poor diagnoses and the lack of chemoprophylaxis, especially, in areas where malaria has spread. Delaying treatment with an appropriate medication is also another reason for the increase in death rates. Other than being bitten from an infected anopheles mosquito, malaria can be transmitted by other ways, such as blood transfusion and from pregnant woman to her fetus. Many types of medications are used to treat malaria or to prevent it. It has been found that in order to treat malaria it is better not use monotherapy alone. In terms of treatment of symptomatic malaria that occurs after the parasites goes out of the liver to the blood, artemisinins, chloroquine, mefloquine, quinine and quinidine, pyrimethamine, sulfadoxine, and tetracycline are considered good drug candidates. Other drugs, which only target the asexual erythrocytic forms of the disease, can’t be used in the primary liver stages; since the parasite didn’t reach the blood yet. These drugs are atovaquone and proguanil. Primaquine is another drug which is not useful for the treatment of symptomatic malaria but rather used to eradicate the intrahepatic hypnozoites of P. vivax and P. ovale that are responsible for relapsing