El problema de la malaria y su situación actual de diagnóstico

After more than 50 years of attempts to control and eradicate it, malaria remains the most common parasitic disease on the planet. About half of the world's population is exposed to the disease, with about 300 million new cases a year. The parasitological diagnosis of malaria is a necessary condition for its management due to the specificity of the treatments for each species, with treatments based on artesunate for P. falciparum infections, and treatments that include several days of primaquine as tissue schizonticide in infections by P. vivax or P. ovale. For more than a hundred years, since the description of the malaria parasite by Alphonse Laveran, microscopy has been the standard for parasitological diagnosis of malaria, with few variations in the method described by Gustav Giemsa in 1904. However, each there are still more studies describing their limitations in the detection of low parasitemias or in the detection of mixed infections; in addition, light microscopy is not available in remote areas of low resources. Also, with the high numbers of failure and resistance of P. falciparum to conventional antimalarials, there has been an increase in the cost of treatments, and this has led to a renewed interest in developing diagnostic strategies that allow cost-efficient management of disease. The most notorious diagnostic strategy in response to this situation is the use of rapid tests based on immunochromatography.