Mothers may pass malaria on to their infants

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Doctors should consider Malaria as the cause of illness in newborns and young infants with fever whose mothers who have immigrated from areas where malaria is common, according to authors of a report in this week’s issue of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

Dr. B. Doraiswamy, at Nassau University Medical Center in East Meadow, New York, and colleagues describe a 7-week-old infant hospitalized in April 2004 with a 1-day history of low-grade fever. After they ruled out serious bacterial infection in the blood and treated him with antibiotics, he was discharged.

Five days later, the patient’s levels of the oxygen-carrying component of blood, hemoglobin, had dropped considerably and his red blood cell count was low.

His doctor examined his blood under a microscope and found he was carrying the parasite that causes malaria. He was successfully treated with the drug chloroquine and a blood transfusion.

Upon questioning in Spanish, the mother reported having recently moved to the US from Guatemala, where malaria is common, and that she had been diagnosed with malaria two years earlier.

Health care providers are reminded that mothers can pass Malaria on to their infants and that they should ask immigrant patients their country of origin, when they moved to the US, and if they had been diagnosed with malaria or other dangerous infectious diseases.

SOURCE: Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, April 2005

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