1.0 INTRODUCTION
Malaria is a significant public health problem in more than 100 countries of the world and causes an estimated 200 million new infections every year. Despite the significant effort to educate this dangerous disease, lack of complete knowledge of its pathophysiology hampers the success in this enterprise. It is wide spread in tropical and sub tropical regions, including part of America, Asia and Africa. Each year, there are approximately 350-500 million cases of malaria (WHO, 2008) Killing between one and three million people, the majority of whom are young children in sub- Sahara Africa . (Snow et al., 2005). 90% of malaria-related deaths occur in sub-Saharan Africa (Green Wood et al., 2005). Annually, some 300 million people get ill from malaria, about one million victims die every year, many of them children, in Africa, one child die of malaria about every 30 seconds according to the world health organization (WHO) “science still has no magic bullet for malaria and many doubt that such a solution will never exist”, malaria as well as being one of the most prevalent and dangerous disease known to man, is also by far the world’s most important tropical disease (Trigg and Kondrachi, 1993). The prevalence of malaria has been escalating at an alarming rate in the last decade. As a matter of fact, the prevalence of malaria in Owerri areas of Imo State (Ukpai and Akoju, 2001) reveals that Owerri has a high rate of malaria infections of 75% and the infection with plasmodiuTn falciparum ranks the highest. Hence, malaria is a major cause of morbidity and mortality.
1.1 JUSTIFICATION
As in many other malaria-endemic regions of sub-Saharan Africa, the most vulnerable groups are children within the age range of 0-5 years. Evidence has shown that the degree of malaria parasiteamia in children has serious effect on hepatic and renal parameters which contributes to the morbidity and mortality of malaria among children in this region. This therefore necessitated the need to study the effect of malaria on some hepatic and renal biochemical parameters.
1.2 AIMS AND OBJECTIVES
To estimate the levels of renal and hepatic parameters in children with acute malaria parasitaemia in Federal Medical Centre, Owerri.