New Tool May Help Treat Malaria through HRP2 Level Detection

Researchers at Michigan State University may have discovered a new way to help treat Malaria in children.

The screening tool could be a game-changer in resource-limited rural health clinics where workers see hundreds of children with malaria each day and must decide which patients can be sent home with oral drugs and which need to be taken to hospitals for more comprehensive care.

"Rural health workers have to make these decisions with very little objective data, and the consequences of an inappropriate decision are huge," said Karl Seydel, MSU assistant professor of osteopathic medical specialties, according to a press release. "Children who progress to cerebral malaria have a 20 percent mortality rate, or even higher if they don't get the right treatment early in the disease process."

Seydel and colleagues report that testing patients' blood for HRP2 - a protein produced by the malaria parasite - was an accurate predictor of how the disease progressed among children at Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital in Blantyre, Malawi.

"We found that if HRP2 levels are low, clinicians can be more than 98 percent sure the child will not progress to cerebral malaria," Seydel said. "That would give them the confidence to merely prescribe oral drugs and send the child home."

Nowhere is the need for such a tool greater than in Africa, where 90 percent of childhood malaria deaths occur. Only about 1 percent of children with malaria develop the life-threatening form of the disease, yet an estimated one million African children die from it each year.

The findings for the study are in the Journal of Infectious Diseases.