Question: How long can you live without any treatments against malaria?

Alena Pance answered on 15 Jun 2020:

Hi Alexia, this a complex question. On one hand malaria is caused by 5 different species of Plasmodium parasites and each of those is quite different from the others. Not all of them will kill the person they infect, causing a mild disease. The most deadly is Plasmodium falciparum, which is widely spread around the world and causes millions of deaths every year. The second most widely spread species is Plasmodium vivax, which, though it is unlikely to kill infected people, is a life long burden because the parasites can form cysts in the liver and cause relapses of the disease. The newcomer is Plasmodium knowlesi, which was detected as infecting humans fairly recently, and has a particular feature that its life cycle is very short so the disease develops very quickly. So your question of how long can you survive without treatment depends very much on what parasite someone is infected with and also who the infected person is, because children under 5 are much more vulnerable than young adults for example. Overall, despite the extremely high number of deaths due to malaria, many people live with the disease throughout their lives. Many of them develop immune defenses against the parasite that can be so effective that some people can have no symptoms at all. This actually represents a huge problem because the people who have no symptoms keep the parasite in the population. However, generally after a mosquito bite it takes 7 to 15 days for diasease to appear and if left untreated it can lead to death. I guess this ia not the most definit answer but it is the closest I can get to.