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Residents of malaria-endemic regions develop partial immunity to malaria over time but lose it if exposure ceases. In two recent studies of patients with imported falciparum malaria, researchers in Europe examined whether severe disease is more likely in persons who have once lived in a malaria-endemic area than in those who have not.
Jennings and colleagues prospectively studied 99 patients (average age, 39 years) hospitalized with falciparum malaria at London’s Hospital for Tropical Diseases between July 2000 and August 2002. They treated the patients according to a standard protocol and collected clinical and demographic data. Twenty-five of the patients met modified WHO criteria for severe infection; among them, the median parasitemia wa…