Quantifying the contribution of Plasmodium falciparum malaria to febrile illness amongst African children
- University of Oxford, United Kingdom
Abstract
Suspected malaria cases in Africa increasingly receive a rapid diagnostic test (RDT) before antimalarials are prescribed. While this ensures efficient use of resources to clear parasites, the underlying cause of the individual's fever remains unknown due to potential coinfection with a non-malarial febrile illness. Widespread use of RDTs does not necessarily prevent over-estimation of clinical malaria cases or sub-optimal case management of febrile patients. We present a new approach that allows inference of the spatiotemporal prevalence of both Plasmodium falciparum malaria-attributable and non-malarial fever in sub-Saharan African children from 2006-2014. We estimate that 35.7% of all self-reported fevers were accompanied by a malaria infection in 2014, but that only 28.0% of those (10.0% of all fevers) were causally attributable to malaria. Most fevers among malaria-positive children are therefore caused by non-malaria illnesses. This refined understanding can help improve interpretation of the burden of febrile illness and shape policy on fever case management.
Data availability
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UNICEF MICS Ghana 2011Available upon request from UNICEF MICS.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Medical Research Council (Doctoral Training Grant)
- Ursula Dalrymple
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (H5R00640 H5R00690)
- Ewan Cameron
- Samir Bhatt
- Daniel J Weiss
- Peter W Gething
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2017, Dalrymple et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Quantifying the contribution of Plasmodium falciparum malaria to febrile illness amongst African children
eLife 6:e29198.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.29198
Further reading
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