TY - JOUR
AU - Lo, Eugenia
AU - Nguyen, Kristie
AU - Nguyen, Jennifer
AU - Hemming-Schroeder, Elizabeth
AU - Xu, Jiaobao
AU - Etemesi, Harrisone
AU - Githeko, Andrew
AU - Yan, Guiyun
T1 - Plasmodium malariae Prevalence and csp Gene Diversity, Kenya, 2014 and 2015
T2 - Emerging Infectious Disease journal
PY - 2017
VL - 23
IS - 4
SP - 601
SN - 1080-6059
AB - In Africa, control programs that target primarily Plasmodium falciparum are inadequate for eliminating malaria. To learn more about prevalence and genetic variability of P. malariae in Africa, we examined blood samples from 663 asymptomatic and 245 symptomatic persons from western Kenya during June–August of 2014 and 2015. P. malariae accounted for 5.3% (35/663) of asymptomatic infections and 3.3% (8/245) of clinical cases. Among asymptomatic persons, 71% (32/45) of P. malariae infections detected by PCR were undetected by microscopy. The low sensitivity of microscopy probably results from the significantly lower parasitemia of P. malariae. Analyses of P. malariae circumsporozoite protein gene sequences revealed high genetic diversity among P. malariae in Africa, but no clear differentiation among geographic populations was observed. Our findings suggest that P. malariae should be included in the malaria elimination strategy in Africa and highlight the need for sensitive and field-applicable methods to identify P. malariae in malaria-endemic areas.
KW - Plasmodium malariae
KW - nested PCR
KW - parasite gene copy number
KW - microscopy
KW - diagnostic sensitivity
KW - circumsporozoite protein diversity
KW - co-infections
KW - parasites
KW - malaria
KW - Kenya
KW - csp
KW - Africa
DO - 10.3201/eid2304.161245
UR - https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/23/4/16-1245_article
ER - End of Reference