Blackwater Fever

Malaria is one of the most common infectious diseases and an enormous public-health problem. It is caused by Plasmodium parasites.
Malaria parasites are transmitted by female Anopheles mosquitoes. The parasites multiply within red blood cells, causing symptoms that include symptoms of anemia (light headedness, shortness of breath, tachycardia etc.), as well as other general symptoms such as fever, chills, nausea, flu-like illness, and in severe cases, coma and death.
Each year, it causes disease in approximately 650 million people and kills between one and three million, most of them young children in Sub-Saharan Africa.
When properly treated, someone with malaria can expect a complete cure.


The most dramatic complications of Malaria are the cerebral malaria and blackwater fever.

Blackwater fever is a dramatic complication of a chronic falciparum malaria course.
The trigger for this complication is obscure, but it is associated with massive hemolysis (destruction of red blood cells) which leads to jaundice, dark urine (blackwater) and kidney failure.