A 57-year old man who was admitted to an emergency room of a tertiary hospital with hemoptysis developed malarial fever 19 days later and then died from severe falciparum malaria 2 days later. He had not traveled outside of Korea for over 30 years. Through intensive interviews and epidemiological surveys, we found that a foreign patient with a recent history of travel to Africa was transferred to the same hospital with severe falciparum malaria. We confirmed through molecular genotyping of the MSP-1 gene that Plasmodium falciparum genotypes of the 2 patients were identical. It is suggested that a breach of standard infection control precautions resulted in this P. falciparum transmission between 2 patients in a hospital environment. This is the first report of a nosocomial transmission of falciparum malaria in Korea.
Africa ; Amino Acid Sequence ; Animals ; Cross Infection/parasitology/*transmission ; Fatal Outcome ; Humans ; Korea ; Malaria, Falciparum/parasitology/*transmission ; Male ; Merozoite Surface Protein 1/chemistry/genetics ; Middle Aged ; Molecular Sequence Data ; Plasmodium falciparum/chemistry/genetics/*isolation & purification ; Protozoan Proteins/chemistry/genetics ; Sequence Alignment ; Travel