INDIA —Pediatrician doctors at the Institute of Child Health have performed an exchange blood transfusion (EBT) procedure that saved a 10-year-old girl who was suffering from severe complications of plasmodium falciparum malaria infection.
Recovered from the ailment and its complications, the girl has been discharged from the hospital, as per Economic Times report.
At the time of her admission to the hospital, it was determined that the girl had a high volume of malaria parasite count in her blood, a condition known as hyperparasitemia, whereby more than 5% of the red blood cells are infected by the malaria parasite.
A high parasite load accelerates the pathological process, increasing the likelihood of developing severe malaria and increasing treatment failure rates.
The child had a very high risk of suffering from irreversible brain damage could the doctors have waited for the antimalarials to work, but luckily, they performed blood transfusion immediately.
The doctors revealed that according to protocol, half of the child’s blood volume was exchanged with new blood on the night of her admission, which she responded to well within 5 days.
The first exchange blood transfusion (EBT) was performed in 1974.
Antimalarials are the mainstay of treatment, but they can fail due to an overburdened parasitic load and/or a lack of time for the drug to act before the disease kills. According to doctors, patients mostly respond to antimalarial drugs when treatment is initiated on time.
Antimalarial resistance, which is most likely in patients with high parasite burdens, is of particular concern.
Malaria kills over 500,000 people each year, the majority of whom are children. Nonetheless, the World Health Organization estimates that between 2000 and 2020, interventions saved around 10.6 million lives from malaria, primarily in Africa.
The majority of the progress was due to the use of bed nets and insecticides. However, a new type of antimalarial treatment, artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACTs), which replaced older drugs like chloroquine, saved a significant number of lives.
Since their introduction in the early 2000s, ACTs have prevented a significant number of malaria deaths when used as a first-line treatment.
ACTs combine an artemisinin derivative with one of five partner drugs or drug combinations. When administered together, the fast-acting artemisinin component eliminates the majority of the parasites within a few days, while the longer-acting partner drug eliminates the stragglers.
The addition of malaria vaccines to the suite of prevention measures has significantly aided the fight against malaria.
These vaccines have the potential to reduce malaria-related illness and death in children under the age of five, who are currently among the most vulnerable populations to the disease.
The WHO granted the vaccine pre-qualification status in September 2022, which is a significant step toward the equitable rollout of Mosquirix.
The pre-qualification stage ensures that United Nations agencies and other major donors only procure and distribute high-quality products.
Recently, researchers from Burkina Faso and Oxford University’s Jenner Institute, made headlines when they released promising results from a clinical trial evaluating the novel R21 malaria vaccine.
The R21 vaccine, like Mosquirix, targets the sporozoite. This is the stage of the malaria parasite that is transmitted to humans when a malaria-infected female Anopheles mosquito feeds on human blood.
When both vaccines are effective, sporozoites are destroyed before they enter the liver. It prevents malaria infection by interrupting the parasite’s life cycle in the human host.
To add to the arsenal of fighting malaria, a monoclonal antibody delivered intravenously was effective in protecting against Plasmodium falciparum infection over a 6-month malaria season in Mali, a phase II placebo-controlled trial showed.
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