Bronchiolitis Obliterans Organizing Pneumonia Caused by Plasmodium vivax Malaria

Acute respiratory distress syndrome due to vivax malaria: case report and literature review

“…Using the electronic databases of MEDLINE (National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD, USA), and manually searching journals published between 1982 and 2003, we found 11 reported cases of vivax malaria with severe pulmonary involvement [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15]. The main features of these cases, including ours, are presented in Table 1.…”

“…The main clinical manifestation of severe malaria caused by P. falciparum includes severe anemia, jaundice, renal failure, cerebral malaria, and ARDS. Sporadically, all of these complications have been reported in vivax malaria [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15]17,18].…”

“…Several pulmonary syndromes in severe vivax malaria have been described, such as acute noncardiogenic pulmonary edema [8,10], ARDS [7,14,15], acute pulmonary injury [6,8,12], and interstitial pneumonia [9]. Respiratory complications of vivax malaria seem to be under-diagnosed.…”

“…Seven of them reported recent travel to endemic areas [6,8,[12][13][14][15], showing the importance of obtaining a detailed epidemiological history to consider imported malaria in the differential diagnosis of acute febrile syndrome. Malaria prophylaxis was not used, or was incorrectly used, in most of the cases [6,8,15]. Nine patients had no past history for malaria [7,9,[11][12][13][14][15].…”

“…Due to the clinical possibility of bacterial pneumonia, most of the patients received antibiotics [6,7,[11][12][13]15]. Anstey et al, raised the hypothesis that the widespread use of chloroquine and doxycycline in malaria-endemic areas could be attenuating or diminishing the number of severe cases of vivax malaria because of the antiinflammatory properties of these drugs [22].…”