Contrary to what we often assume, malaria is alive and well in the West. This article will explore the biochemistry of how ultra low-grade malaria, almost universally undiagnosed, is a common cause of dairy allergies, bloating and acidity symptoms. The parasite does this by interrupting our metabolism of nutritional chlorine (Cl#17).

So how do we get it?

Let us examine the facts in the case.

Historical Malaria in the West

Considered the most significant and lethal parasite in human history, malaria has clearly been with us throughout time. There are mosquito fossils dated at 100 million years old, and remember (fictional) Jurassic Park, where mosquitoes in amber where the source of extinct dinosaur DNA.

Malaria was probably the source of the traditional European and English medical condition called ague (fever and shakes).

More recently, here is a malaria map of the United States from 1870. It shows where people were dying of malaria 150 years ago, though it has a convoluted way of tracking it (proportion of deaths from malaria to deaths from other causes). Dying, mind you. Not just picking it up: getting malaria so badly they died from it.

Looking at this map I can say thank God the mosquitoes observed the political boundaries and didn’t cross the Canadian border.

The story is similar in Europe. Here is a malaria map of Italy from 1882.

If you look at the history, particularly in pre-WWII Italy where this was well documented, there really was a radical and comprehensive elimination campaign. They (in this case the Fascist party under Mussolini) dredged the swamps (standing water is a breeding ground for malaria mosquitos), implemented national medication protocols, put screens on windows, educated the populace and pioneered the use of insecticides like DDT (now notorious for decimating bird populations).

In 1951, in a magnificent if not entirely accurate advertising campaign, the United States was declared malaria-free. That was the year when supposedly, every malaria-bearing mosquito in the continental United States winked out of existence. Italy followed in 1962.

This was a problem in that these declarations only became accurate because the definition of ‘malaria-free’ was changed from ‘there being no malaria anymore’ to ‘a tonne of people are no longer dying from malaria so let’s cheer everyone up and start the new narrative that we are free of it’.

To understand why, we need to examine what malaria actually is and where we can get it from.

What is Malaria

Malaria is the name we give to a single-celled blood parasite called plasmodium, that we get from mosquito bites. Here is a picture of plasmodium. The white structures are blood cells. The plasmodia are the tiny purple dots, some inside the blood cells and some free-floating in the blood stream.

The word malaria itself comes from the Medieval Italian, mal for bad and aria for air. Bad air wafting in from the swamps was believed to cause illness as a holdover from the ancient medical philosophy of Hippocrates (460-375 BC) and the Miasma theory of illness. We only learned about the actual malaria parasite in 1880 when it was isolated by Alphonse Laveran, a French army doctor.

Here is an artist’s rendering of a single plasmodium parasite. For the record, this parasite is the biggest mass murderer in human history. It is estimated to kill around 2.5 million people a year, and this number may have been higher in historical times even with a lower global population.

If it is any consolation, they are not actually blue.

 

Malaria is spread by the female Anopheles mosquito. There are about 3500 known species of mosquitoes in the world, and the Anopheline group covers about 60 of them. Because they transmit malaria they have been the most widely studied.

Life Cycle of Malaria

Technically there are four species of malaria (M.falciparum, M.viva, M.malariae and M.ovale) but we don’t need to go into that here. Like all parasites, malaria has an interesting and complex life cycle that in this case revolves between anopheles mosquitoes and humans.

When a female anopheles mosquito bites a human that is infected with malaria, she picks up the parasite that is in the final stage of its life cycle called a gametocyte. Gametocytes are male and female forms of malaria that cannot reproduce sexually in humans, they can only do so in a mosquito. They remain alive in us for 16-32 days, so if we are not bitten for a few weeks, these forms die off. However, more gametocytes are continuously reproduced, so we always have a supply of live gametocytes and eventually, when an infected person is bitten by this particular species of mosquito, the gametocytes are uptaken with the blood meal and move to the gut of mosquito and there they do begin to reproduce sexually.

Their offspring in the mosquito are called sporozoites. These sporozoites migrate to the salivary glands of the mosquito and as it bites a new human victim, they pass out with its saliva and move into the blood stream of the human. Seen in the opposing image, at this stage of their life cycle, they look quite similar to a microscopic blood worm but they are not actually green.

Once in a human, the sporozoites are at a vulnerable stage where white blood cells can kill them. To avoid this, they move to the liver within hours of infection. There, they begin an incubation period where they reproduce asexually.

Within days or weeks, the offspring of the sporozoites, now called merozoites, move out into the blood stream. Merozoites corkscrew into our red blood cells and, once again safe from our immune systems, begin to auto populate, reproducing tens of copies per blood cell. When these have gestated (this takes 48 to 72 hours) the red blood cell ruptures, is killed, and all these newly produced merozoites flood back into the blood stream, where they immediately infect more red blood cells. Seen in this opposing image, they actually are of a yellowish color. Finally, an artist got the color right.

This is the stage of the disease that we associate with traditional malaria symptoms, and the severity of the symptoms in a host is proportionate with the volume of merozoites autopopulating throughout their blood stream.

Over time, some of these merozoites produce a sexual pair called gametocytes. These gametocytes cannot reproduce in the blood, but circulate around waiting to be uptaken as a blood meal by a female anopheles mosquito. Once inside the mosquito, the life cycle has completed itself.

Malarial Life Cycle Summary:

In Humans: Sporozoites move to the liver, produce Merozoites. Merozoites reproduce in red blood cells. Merozoites eventually produce sexual pairs called Gametocytes, but these cannot reproduce in a human. They wait for you to be bitten by a mosquito.

In Mosquitoes: the Gametocytes reproduce in the gut of the mosquito. Their Sporozoite offspring migrate to the salivary glands and infect a human.

Because there are 3500 species of mosquitoes, the practical concern with malaria isn’t that of what countries can you be bitten in per se. It is, more to the point, what countries contain anopheles mosquitoes.

What Countries You Get Malaria From

Almost all of them by the looks of it. This map by the Malaria Atlas Project shows a distribution of about 50 species of anophelines throughout every country on the planet including southern Canada and northern Australia.

So this mentality that you have to go to Africa or Brazil or India to get malaria doesn’t line up with the facts in the case.

There are however, a series of technicalities that we need to understand.

Malaria Technicalities

You may not get malaria, even if you live in one of these areas. Whether you do is dependent upon a number of details. Let’s divide the facts into two groups. We might call the first group MOSQUITO TECHNICALITIES.

1. Mosquitoes avoid sunlight because it dries out their wings, so you are more likely to be bitten in the shade, at dusk or at night.

2. Only the females bite because males don’t have a stinger.

3. The female anopheles nests in moist areas, such as swamps, ponds, rivers and marshes, or standing pools of water. Then, she can only fly a maximum of 3 km (2 miles) so if you’re far enough away from a water source, you may dodge the bullet, so to speak.

4. A female mosquito mother is not thought to be able to transmit the gametocyte or sporozoite forms to her offspring, so every infected mosquito must be infected initially by biting an infected human.

5. The anopheles mosquito only lives for 2 weeks and then dies of old age.

These first five points seem to be in our favor, but the next three are not:

6. Female anopheles are voracious feeders. Once on a biting spree they bite multiple people.

7. Mosquitoes do not find people randomly. They are attracted to us. They have long range CO2 sensors that tell them where people are breathing. Up close they have scent receptors that help to identify humans, and rather creepily, they have eyes that can see us.

8. While some species such as the culex mosquito make a loud buzzing or zizzing sound when they fly, the anopheles mosquito is deadly quiet.

In theory, because of their 2 week lifespan and because they cannot transmit the parasite to their offspring, if enough people were treated that the infection curve were flattened or broken, you really could decimate a malaria epidemic in a region, and this was probably the basis for the various statements in the 20th century that malaria had been eradicated in the USA and Italy.

The problem is the human factor. We might think of these as HUMAN TECHNICALITIES.

1. We often go out at night and even when we don’t, mosquitoes can get into the house. They also live (and bite) in the shade during the day so there is no avoiding them.

2. With an estimated 110 trillion individual mosquitoes on the planet, there are roughly 15,000 mosquitoes per person and presumably about half are female – the biting type. While not all of these are anopheline, some clearly are.

3. While mosquitoes only travel 3 km, people frequently travel around the world, and get bitten all over the place at popular tourist destinations: Mexico, Costa Rica, Peru, Brazil, Japan, the Philippines, Southern Europe, India and South East Asia, not to mention missionaries going to places like Haiti, Central and South America and various countries in Africa, all of which are malaria hot spots. I will also mention migrants as the world of 2024 seems to be in the midst of a significant population migration, with some countries seeing as high as a 10 to 20% population increase. The bulk of these migrants tend to come from parts of the world where malaria is prevalent.

4. Human females certainly do transmit malaria to their offspring, a process in epidemiology called vertical transmission. You cannot get it from having sex with or kissing your partner, but if a mother has it, her babies get it.

5. Humans live for 60 to 80 years on average, and once infected, unless they are comprehensively treated they stay infected for life. There is no comprehensive malaria treatment available in Western medicine though historically quinine was thought to be effective and more recently, drugs such as hydroxychloroquine can help. The treatment mentality with malaria is to reduce the burden of the parasite so that the host is asymptomatic.

6. Even if you are uninfected, there is no way to know who else a mosquito bit before it bit you. If it bit an infected person, given enough time (hours, days) it will transmit that to you. That is, after all, how you get malaria in the first place.

7. Malaria infected mosquitoes can try to bite you a trillion times, but they only need to succeed once.

8. There is no way to hear them coming and you can’t be watching all angles of your body at the same time.

So this is the problem I’m seeing: Canada, the USA, Australia, England and Europe haven’t had an endemic malaria problem for almost 50 years, but anopheles mosquitoes that are capable of transmitting malaria do live in these countries. People travel to parts of the world where they can pick up malaria and bring it back, and even when they don’t, migrants or even tourists travel in, carrying malaria. For example, consider this article from the Economist about a malaria resurgence in Switzerland.

Malaria Math

Do the math and see what you find. Here’s my math (in sentence form). All that needs to happen for you to pick up malaria is:

1. Travel to anywhere in the world where there are anopheles mosquitoes that have bitten a single other person who has malaria, and get yourself bitten once. Just once, without hearing it, feeling it or needing to see it happen.

2. Don’t travel, but get bitten at home by an anopheles mosquito that has bitten someone else, also at home, that has malaria. This can either be someone who has gone away on vacation to a malaria destination (Mexico, Costa Rica, etc.) or someone who has lived in one of these places and now lives near you. They can live 3 km away. You don’t need to know them personally. You don’t even need to know they exist or for that matter, that you were bitten.

3. Don’t get bitten at all. Just be born by a mother who has, as per above, either traveled or not traveled.

Based on this math, I think the question we should be asking is not how could we get malaria but how could we possibly avoid it?

Symptoms and Grades of Malaria

In Western medicine, malaria is given different grades of severity (low, medium, high, etc) and there are different ways of arriving at these grades (blood testing, PCR where they look for malarial DNA). The problem with the grading system is that you already have to have pretty severe symptoms to get diagnosed and assigned a grade.

The larger problem is that ultra-low-grade malaria isn’t diagnosed at all. There is a mentality in the medical system that you have to have a fever, chills and vomiting or it isn’t malaria so they won’t even test you for it. North America and Europe are, after all, malaria-free. Remember? It was declared in a big media splash so it must be the case.

To sift through the uncertainty of whether or not you have it, I propose a very simple, practical way of grading and self-diagnosing malaria for the non-specialist lay person. Simply put, there are four types of malaria you can have.

1. No-grade: Malaria that is causing no symptoms at all.

2. Ultra-Low-grade: Malaria that is causing symptoms, but that are too obscure to resemble traditional malaria, but that you are well aware of and may have had for years: acidity, dairy allergies, gluten allergies, stomach pain, back pain, bloating and gassiness, a protruding and swollen abdomen, acid reflux, as well as sinus issues, nose blowing, reactivity to seasonal pollens and a tendency to experience redness and irritation in the eyes and sinuses.

3. Low- to Medium-grade: Malaria that is causing actual symptoms that are recognizable as a low-grade form of the disease: sweats, particularly at 24, 48 or 72 hour intervals, fever or tendency to get weird regular hot flashes, nausea, occasional vomiting, acid reflux, headaches, disorientation.

4. High-grade: Malaria that is easily recognizable as a high-grade infection: in addition to those symptoms listed above, there will be severe regular vomiting and diarrhea, kidney infections, swelling of the skin (edema), swelling of the lungs (pulmonary edema), bleeding, anemia and jaundice.

We have all grown up being assured that there is no malaria in the West because it is not common to develop high-grade type-4 symptoms from the above list, or for that matter even type-3. At least, not from walking out in our back yards. This makes sense, because the factor that leads to medium- and high-grade malaria is being bitten again and again. For this to happen you would need to live in an area where malaria is endemic and never get on top of it with medications.

It is the ultra low-grade form we are interested in here and to develop it, you only need to be bitten once. A single bite from an infected mosquito is enough to get malaria, and because it can autopopulate once inside you, its symptoms can worsen over time.

This is the type that I tend to see the most in my muscle testing clinics. I sometimes see type 1 (no-grade) but since it is causing no symptoms, it will not be the reason why someone booked in for an assessment. I rarely see types 3 and 4 (low-to-medium, and high-grade) because if someone knew they had malaria, they would get tested and treated for it through their country’s medical system. That would render them asymptomatic and they would mistakenly think the treatment fully eliminated the parasites.

It is type-2, that I call ultra-low grade malaria, that I commonly see because it causes a series of symptoms that can worsen over time. A person with these symptoms knows something is wrong but they don’t know what, and muscle testing when used scientifically can be a great way to explore the root causes of unknown health issues. For a survey of my interpretation philosophy, consider this article outlining the Health Ladder, a teaching tool I developed a few years ago to illustrate the relationship between symptoms and their root causes. 

The remainder of this article will focus on the identification, symptomology and biochemistry of the category of ultra-low grade malaria.

Muscle Testing for Malaria

The simplest way to  identify if you have the malaria parasite is to have someone muscle test you for malarial medication. It is reasonable to conclude that if you are testing for needing the pills, you must have the parasite that the pills treat.

The simplicity of this approach cannot be overemphasized. Simple, elegant and revolutionary in its implications, the whole world should be doing this…except I don’t think they’d like the answer they’d get.

Another way to muscle test for malaria is to do so with a small sample of pure chlorine gas.

Note: Chlorine is a deadly poison in its elemental form, so it must be safely sealed in a glass ampoule, and then further sealed and insulated in a plastic tube, and then that tube should be placed in an outer plastic bottle, and ideally that should be stored in a foam case, so that there are three or four layers of insulation. Then, you should only use a very small sample indeed, so that if it breaks, the gas escaping into the air won’t be enough to harm anyone’s lungs. Finally, to be clear, I am not telling you to do this. I am merely telling you what not to do if you didn’t not do it.

Assuming you have taken all of these safety precautions, you would place the hypothetical chlorine sample against yours (or someone else’s) stomach (i.e., inside the 5 inch range of the body’s bioelectric field) and see if it provoked a weak muscle test as compared to an original strong/positive baseline.

If it did, that would not in itself be conclusive for malaria as three other classes of parasite are also indicated by chlorine: a certain type of amoeba (these would be indicated for if the chlorine sample was cancelled out by metronidazole), another type of amoeba (cancelled out by tinidazole), and cryptosporidium (cancelled out by nitazoxanide). However if a sample of hydroxychloroquine cancelled out the chlorine, that would be evidence of the presence of malaria in the host, since hydroxychloroquine primarily treats malaria. I supposed if you didn’t have a medication on hand, pure quinine would also work as that is (used to be, at least) a well known antimalarial medication but you may have a hard time getting your hands on the bark of the cinchona tree.

I’m sorry if the pharmacology outlined here is more sophisticated than the average reader is able to understand. It is essential however that this article should provide an educational bridge from the general concept of malaria to the specific and vitally important question of whether you have found it in yours or someone else’s blood stream. Without these muscle tests (hydroxychloroquine only, or chlorine when cancelled out by hydroxychloroquine) there is no simple way to identify it in someone who falls in the ultra low grade category.

For a medical practitioner applying this methodology, positive evidence of malaria in a muscle test, combined with a list of ultra low grade malarial symptoms (listed below) may provide a rationale for further medical testing where it can be formally, visually identified in the blood stream.

The Chlorine Chemistry of Malaria

But why chlorine (Cl#17)?

It is a little-understood principle of all parasites that each of them has its own unique chemical metabolism.

There is a precedent for this in human biology. You know (whether you realize you know it or not) that we are phosphorus based organisms. We all have tiny energy producing organelles in our cells called mitochondria. Mitochondria produce a chemical called ATP that fuels our metabolism. Phosphorus (P#15) is the P in ATP. Without phosphorus we would die in seconds, so you might think of a human as a phosphorus-dependent organism.

The concept of being dependent upon an element for basic metabolism also applies to all parasites, bacteria and viruses, except that there are 98 elements that play a biological role and phosphorus is only one of them. Each parasite, bacteria and virus has a metabolism that is dependent upon one of the 98 elements. One category of them does actually use phosphorus just like we do, but there are 97 other categories of organisms, one for each element.

The species of malaria that we are interested in here has a chlorine-based metabolism, though for the record in a clinical setting I have also identified strains of malaria that use fluorine (F#9) and bromine (Br#35). At the time of this writing I have not found an iodine-based (I#53) malaria but I assume one exists just based on the chemistry. There is in addition evidence of a very unusual strain of malaria that uses americium (Am#95). In that case, a muscle test of americium is cancelled out by hydroxychloroquine and the symptoms are similar to those listed below, but would also include anxiety. So this metabolism issue is a complex field. For it to begin to make sense you would need to know your chemistry, and it’s great if you do but okay if you don’t.

Simply put, when we combine the pharmacology (hydroxychloroquine) with the chemistry (elemental chlorine) in a muscle test, we have a reasonable, immediate means of both identifying a strain of malaria and quantifying its chemistry. And as we will see in the next section, the chemistry is vital to understanding the symptoms.

Biological Role of Chlorine

To understand the symptoms of a chlorine based strain of malaria, we must be familiar with the biological role of chlorine. We get our chlorine mostly from salt (NaCl or sodium chloride). Once inside our bodies, the sodium and chloride ions separate.

The sodium ions regulate the osmotic pressure in our cells, assist in maintaining hydration (having a moist tongue, etc) and form the sodium-potassium pumps that produce our bioelectric field, as referenced in my Book 1 Experiments in Muscle Testing on pages 37 through 40.

Chlorine is an essential gas that also regulates cell osmotic pressure. Probably its best known role is to form hydrochloric acid in the gastric pits of the stomach – chlorine is the Cl in HCl (the chemical name for stomach acid). In general it buffers acids and bases, upregulates the amylase (starch) and lactase (dairy) enzymes. It facilitates B12 absorption and has an excitatory effect on neuronal signalling. Chlorine citrate regulates pupil contraction. But perhaps most notably of all, it upregulates our mucosal linings, and these form protective layers in our eyes, sinuses, nose, throat, digestive tract, lungs, kidneys and bladder. Then, as a sort of external mucosal lining, chlorine contributes to our skin formation, and finally, it bonds with calcium to act as an alkalizing agent in our blood streams, and this is probably partly why the malaria parasite likes our blood so much.

So what might happen if a parasite that is chlorine-dependent starts autopopulating in our blood streams and over time, steals greater and greater amounts of our nutritional chlorine?

Ultra-Low Grade Malaria Symptoms

These symptoms make the most sense when seen in the context of the biological role of chlorine itself. If the malaria parasite steals chlorine from:

1. Our stomachs: we don’t produce enough HCl and get bloating and indigestion (or if it causes too much HCl, we get bad acidity).
2. The mucosal linings in our intestines: we can experience bloating, pain and acidity since there is nothing to protect us from our own digestive acids.
3. The mucosal linings in our eyes and sinuses: we get red irritated and itchy eyes and sinuses with periodic sneezing, sniffling and post nasal drip. This can lead to inflammation and be experienced as seasonal allergies. Since grasses and pollens are high in chlorine, they can have an inflammatory effect on the mucosal areas in the eyes and sinuses and this explains the classic redness associated with allergy symptoms.
4. The mucosal linings in our lungs: This can lead to chronic coughs, lung irritation, shortness of breath and exercise induced asthma.
5. Our skin: This often leads to rosacea or eczema, though these conditions can also stem from a chlorine virus.
6. Our amylase enzymes: we won’t digest starches properly such as corn and wheat. This accounts for about 20% of all the gluten allergies I see in my clinics.
7. Our lactase enzymes: we won’t digest dairy. This accounts for about 40% of all the dairy allergies I see in my clinics. That is a huge percentage for such a common ailment.
8. Our pupils: it will be difficult for our eyes to zoom in on small print, and can lead to blurred vision.
9. Our brains: our neuronal firing intensity will reduce and this can be experienced as brain fog.
10. Our B12 absorption pathways: this can lead to B12 deficiency, where extreme forms are known as pernicious anemia.
11. Our blood: this would cause the bloodstream to become less alkaline (i.e. more acidic) leading to inflammation.
12. The mucosal linings in our bladder: this could lead to periodic UTIs or urinary tract infections, as well as increased frequency of urination and needing to get up at night to pee with the secondary effect of insomnia from not sleeping through the night.

If your malarial infection was ultra low grade enough, and didn’t worsen at a noticeable rate, so that none of these symptoms were particularly severe, you might simply think you had mild bloating, occasional acidity, weak lungs and bladder, a dairy or gluten allergy, a bit of brain fog and that your eyes were getting weaker as you aged. You might simply think you were getting old.

A thought: considering the above symptoms, if that is what an interruption of our chlorine metabolism can do, and if chlorine is one of 98 biological elements, imagine what all the other elements can do, and then you will have caught a brief glimpse of the complexity of how parasites, bacteria, viruses and pathogenic fungi interact with our bodies.

This concept of the biological roles of the elements is explored in more detail in my Book 4: Muscle Testing for Metal Toxicity, which is due out any year now.

Malaria Treatments

Long before the plasmodium parasite was discovered in the 1880s, there had been a working treatment for malaria since the 1650s. This involved drinking a tincture of the bark from the Peruvian cinchona tree. The Encyclopedia Britannica states that by 1605, “shipments of cinchona bark were being regularly sent to Spain from its colonies. The skillful use of “Peruvian bark” by the English physician Thomas Sydenham (1624–89) helped to separate malaria from other fevers and served as one of the first practices of specific drug therapy.”

Cinchona bark extract was famously used by the British in India as a tonic, and since it was quite bitter, served with a lime, soda water and a splash of gin, hence the drink gin and tonic of repute. Cinchona was later refined by Bayer in the 1930s as the antimalarial drug chloroquine, and later hydroxychloroquine was introduced that had more broad applications and is still in use today.

If people in the 2020s have malaria, as evidenced in this NIH article, 90% of them can expect their symptoms to fully resolve if they take antimalarial medicine.

However, this implies that 10% of people still experience chronic malaria post-medicative treatment, and this is probably generally accurate. The assumption in these cases seems to be that either the sporozoa phase of its life cycle is resistant to the medication and survives in the liver, continuing to produce merozoas, or that some of the merozoans themselves, as they autopopulate throughout the blood stream, are sometimes medication resistant. One way or the other, chronic malarial infections are a worldwide concern. 10% is a lot of people.

If the medications work and the symptoms are gone, great.

If you are in the 10% that have a medication resistant strain of malaria, there isn’t a lot you can do from a medical or pharmaceutical standpoint. This is probably due to some random factor in the parasite itself, where the medication could work, but the dosage needed to kill it is too high for the host to safely consume (i.e. the dosage toxicity problem, as referenced in Experiments in Muscle Testing, p.141, Carter 2021).

I am not going to comment here on the potential for an electromagnetic waveform (i.e. a frequency) to have a terminal effect on malaria. That is a complex field and a real can of worms. We are at the end of this article and that would be the beginning of another one.

My concern at this stage, is not that the world is unaware that a frequency based technology is the future of human healthcare. It is (the future…) and we are (unaware…), but that’s not my main concern. My main concern is more pressing: that anyone reading this article—you, for example—is not even aware of whether they have malaria at all. There is a certain kind of paradox found in presenting a solution to someone who is not even aware that they have a problem.

Ultimately the problem with malaria is a lack of awareness of malaria itself. If you’ve ever travelled, or not travelled, or been born, you probably have it. So the real question is do you have symptoms?

Symptoms and Post-Vacation Self Check-up

You are statistically unlikely to be in the minuscule population of the world that has never had malaria and never will. Very simply put, there are two ways that you can have malaria. Now, or in the future. But you will get it. Just look at the map of the distribution of anopheles mosquitoes. You don’t even need to travel to one of these places, you just need to be bitten by a mosquito who has bitten someone—that you don’t need to know personally—who has travelled there. You can’t control that or prevent it. Mosquitoes don’t give you a resumé of who else they have bitten.

The best thing you can do is periodically perform a malaria self-check-up. Do you have any of the following:

1. Bloating and indigestion
2. Stomach/intestinal pain and/or acidity
3. Allergy symptoms (irritated eyes and sinuses)
4. A chronic cough or lung irritation 
5. Some form of eczema or skin condition
6. Difficulty digesting starches or gluten
7. Difficulty digesting dairy
8. Poor close-up vision or blurred vision
9. Brain fog
10. Some form of anemia, particularly pernicious anemia (B12 deficiency) 
11. General inflammation
12. Periodic or frequent bladder infections

Having these symptoms doesn’t guarantee that malaria is the root cause, as hundreds of other parasites, or combinations of parasites, can cause similar symptoms. However, having these symptoms is a good start at a identifying root causes and malaria is, at least, an important thing to take off your checklist of considerations.

What’s the alternative? You have these symptoms because… you’re getting old? they’re causing themselves? it’s irritable bowel syndrome? leaky gut? the word allergies? That’s as silly as saying that it is raining outside because the clouds have rain-itis. Yes it’s raining but there is a root cause. There are also root causes of your symptoms that have nothing to do with the words that describe those symptoms. Bloating isn’t caused by the word bloating. A dairy allergy didn’t cause itself, any more than the rain caused itself.

If you start thinking this way, you will find yourself empowered to delve deeper into possible root causes, such as malaria.

I will add a note in parting: one thing you might want to do is set yourself a 3-month and 6-month post-vacation calendar reminder to run a self-diagnostic check to see if you have started to develop the malarial symptoms listed above AFTER you get back from vacation. You will rarely develop malarial symptoms in the week you are bitten. A minor initial infection of these parasites would require a 3 to 6 month autopopulation curve before you started to become aware that you had a problem. It is a rare person indeed that becomes sick and knows to blame it on a mosquito bite 3 to 6 months previous.

Hopefully, now that you have read this article, that rare person is you.