Unexpectedly, age, duration of symptoms, immune status, parasitaemia level, bilirubin value and the presence of shock were not statistically associated with mortality, even though hyperbilirubinaemia and shock were more frequent in patients who died, but diverse results are found in different studies [31] . These results should be interpreted with some caution because the study covers a small number of patients over a long period of time, although this does not necessarily explain the discrepancies between this and other studies. Previous papers reporting malaria parameters associated with mortality, mainly retrospective, have different aims and different degrees of severity and only a few of them take ICU cohorts into consideration [12, 13, 32, 33] . This is the case of a study reported in 2003 from a French group that evaluated 188 ICU patients with imported falciparum malaria over a 12-year period [10] with an overall mortality rate of 5.3% but, in most severe patients, the mortality rate was 11%. Factors associated with death were SAPS II, shock, acidosis, coma, pulmonary oedema and coagulation disorders.