We recruited children aged from 6 months to 13 years using five participant definitions. The malaria-positive children, the cases, are Uncomplicated Malaria (UM), Severe Malarial Anemia (SMA) and Cerebral Malaria (CM). The malaria-negative children, the controls, are Disease Control (DC) and Community Controls (CC). We followed the WHO criteria for severe P. falciparum malaria [10] . Cerebral malaria cases were defined as children in unrousable coma for at least one hour in the presence of asexual P. falciparum parasitemia with normal cerebrospinal fluid. A Blantyre coma score less than 2 was used to assess coma status. Children with hypoglycemia were excluded from the study. Added to the Table 1 . Characteristics of discovery and validation study groups. strict clinical and laboratory definitions of CM, our study patients recover consciousness after effective antimalarial therapy. We excluded from this study those CM patients who died. Our overall mortality rate for CM is of the order of 10%. Severe malarial anemia cases were defined as conscious children with Packed Cell Volume (PCV) less than 16% in the presence of P. falciparum parasitemia. We excluded from this study those SMA patients who died. Our overall mortality rate for SMA is less than 1%. Uncomplicated malaria cases were defined as febrile children with P. falciparum parasitemia who did not require hospital admission. Our study was designed to discover and validate plasma proteome changes in dichotomous cases for which we only included those children with CM and UM with PCV greater than 20% (Table 1) . We excluded from the study blood culture positive cases. Although we did not carry out blood cultures in all severe malaria patients, the cases recruited into this study are those in whom septicemia was not suspected and who were successfully treated with antimalarial alone. The DC group consists of malaria-negative children with infectious diseases such as meningitis, otitis media, diarrhea and upper respiratory tract infections. It also includes mild to moderately anemic children and children admitted for surgery.