Abstract

Malaria is a life-threatening disease, an intermittent and remittent fever caused by Plasmodium parasites that are transmitted to people through the bites of infected female Anopheles mosquitoes.

Although measures have been taken by the Cameroon government to provide low cost and highly effective antimalarial therapies such as quinine, artesunate, artemisinin amongst others to rapidly treat and completely clear-off this parasites from the blood, mainly P.falciparum which is the main causative agent of malaria in the country, a small fraction of the population still rely on slow and ineffective traditional herbs to combat this infection.

This low quality traditional herbs takes longer time to exert it effect and in most cases do not completely treat the infection. They only suppress the parasites, retaining it in the blood circulation of infected patients. In this study, the presence of P.falciparum in 150 P.falciparum positive human blood samples and it absent in another 150 P.falciparum negative human blood samples were confirm via PCR and microscopy.

The P.falciparum parasite and leucocytes were counted in positive samples while only the leucocytes were counted in negative samples using the microscope. Data captured were analyse using reference ranges and inferencial statistical methods (Correlation and linear regression) on SPSS version 25. Upon analysis on SPSS using the correlation and linear regression to determine the correlation between P.falciparum infection and leucocytes count, a significant difference was observed at P<0.05.

We therefore concluded that there was a correlation between P.falciparum infection and leucocytes count, and an increase in P.falciparum in the blood will result to a decrease in blood leucocytes.

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