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