Question: How does Malaria affect the inside of your body

Malaria makes people quite sick, and can affect different people differently, causing several types of illness. Almost everyone infected with malaria gets a high fever – which can be up to 41 and 42 degrees celcius (normal body temperature is 37) which is dangerously high, especially for little babies.

Malaria is a parasite that lives inside your red blood cells, and once it gets inside, it grows and multiples for about 2 days and 16-32 new malaria parasites are made. These new malaria parasites then burst out of the red blood cell, destroying it, and then the malaria can find more red blood cells to infect. And then this cycle continues every two days, infect, multiply, burst out, find a new cell, infect…. There’s a video of malaria here http://youtu.be/_OIY-M6GnCU (the red cell bit starts is at about 2:40, and 3:20 is when the parasites burst out of the red blood cells)

So malaria causes a loss of blood (anemia), it can also stick in the brain and cause seizures and coma, and it can also cause problems in the lungs, which makes it really difficult to breath. It can affect patients differently, so some people go into a coma, some people struggle to breath, some people recover and are fine. But sometimes these serious illnesses caused by malaria do kill people, and the people who die from malaria are usually kids under the age of 5, and pregnant women.