Cross Reactivity of Febrile Malaria with Brucellosis and Typhoid
Cross Reactivity of Febrile Malaria with Brucellosis and Typhoid
Nawal Abd-elhafez Hassanain1, Raafat Mohamed Shaapan1*, Ahmed Maher1, Ahmed Badwi Yousif2, Gomaa Desoky Emam2
ABSTRACT
Malaria misdiagnosis is a common condition that receives insufficient medical attention. It is remarkable that clinical signs of human malaria are not pathologically indicative and shared with a variety febrile diseases. The study aimed to screen patients attending El Fayoum and El Zigzag (El Sharkaria governorate) fever hospitals presenting with malaria-like symptoms for the possibility of false-positive malaria diagnosis by card test RDT (Rapid Diagnostic Test) due to typhoid fever and brucellosis and finally to determine if the associated individual characteristics were serologically positive to these diseases. The collected 504 blood samples were screened for malaria (card test ‘RDTs and microscopic blood film examination), typhoid fever (Widal test, blood culture and stool analysis) and brucellosis (Rose Bengal test ‘RBT’ and also standard agglutination test ‘SAT’) a similar time. The results showed that 29 of 504 examined cases (5.75%) were RDTs positive while all examined blood samples were negative for malaria by microscopic blood film examination. Out of the 29 positive RDTs cases 11 were positive for brucellosis (2.18%) and 18 for typhoid fever (3.57%). Our finding concluded that, it should be emphasized the practical application of cultural approaches for the identification of brucellosis and typhoid fever or any other acute febrile illness (AFI) in our clinical laboratories must rule out any cases of malaria that have symptoms that are similar to the symptoms of the disease and improve patient management by lowering treatment costs and removing other risks related with antibiotic misuse.
Keywords | Cross reactivity, Febrile, Malaria, Brucellosis, Typhoid fever
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