Prevalence of mosquito-borne Plasmodium infection in patients attending fever clinic in a tertiary-care teaching hospital, western India

Abstract

Background: Malaria is a serious vector-borne parasitic infection worldwide in distribution, and it is still one of the important causes of morbidity and mortality in India. In a developing country such as India, it has dramatic socioeconomic consequences. Objective: To study the prevalence of fever cases being diagnosed as malaria and to determine the trend of malaria. Materials and Methods: The blood samples of about 2,047 patients who presented with fever between the time period of May 2014 and April 2015 were examined by peripheral blood smear (PBS) for malaria. Result: In this study, the blood samples of 2,047 fever cases suspected for malaria were sent for diagnosis to a microbiology laboratory in a tertiary-care teaching hospital. Among those, 48 (2.34%) of them showed positivity for malaria. According to the types of Plasmodium spp., Plasmodium vivax and Plasmodium falciparum accounted for 95.83% and 4.17% of malaria cases, respectively. The prevalence of malarial infection exhibited seasonal trend with many cases from the month of May to November with a peak in September. Malaria was reported in all age groups and both sexes, but commonly affected age group were between 21 and 30 years of age, and male patients were affected more than two times than the female patients. Conclusion: This study about the survey on malaria reflected seasonal malarial transmission, and P. vivax was the most common type of malaria parasite. The lower socioeconomic and the younger aged groups were the mostly affected, causing serious health problems.