Can Mixed Parasite Infections Thwart Targeted Malaria Elimination Program in India?

Upasana Shyamsunder Singh, Nisha Siwal, Veena Pande, Aparup Das

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    Abstract

    India is highly endemic to malaria with prevalence of all five species of human malaria parasites of Plasmodium genus. India is set for malaria elimination by 2030. Since cases of mixed Plasmodium species infections remain usually undetected but cause huge disease burden, in order to understand the distributional prevalence of both monospecies infections and mixed species infections in India, we collated published data on the differential infection incidences of the five different malaria parasites based on PCR diagnostic assay. About 11% of total cases were due to mixed species infection. Among several interesting observations on both single and mixed parasitic infections, incidences of Plasmodium falciparum monoinfection were found to be significantly higher than P. vivax monoinfection. Also, P. malariae seems to be emerging as a potential malaria threat in India. Putting all the facts together, it appears that the dream of achieving malaria elimination in India will not be completely successful without dealing with mixed species infection.
    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)1-11
    Number of pages11
    JournalBioMed Research International
    Volume2017
    Early online date16 Aug 2017
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2017

    Fingerprint

    Dive into the research topics of 'Can Mixed Parasite Infections Thwart Targeted Malaria Elimination Program in India?'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

    Cite this