This is classically the most lethal clinical complication of severe falciparum malaria and the definition is also very imprecise with a wide spectrum of possible presentations, such as: impaired consciousness or unrousable coma (Glasgow coma score ≤10 or Blantyre coma scale ≤2); prostration, i.e. generalized weakness so that the patient is unable walk or sit up without assistance; failure to feed; or multiple convulsions (more than two episodes in 24 h). Despite being infrequent in our studies, the phenomenon was also reported but not only in children [36, 86] . These reports must be very cautious in terms of ruling out other malarial complications as the cause of the neurological manifestations, such as hypoglycaemia and metabolic acidosis, but also associated infections as bacterial or viral meningoencephalitis. In India, acute intermittent porphyria was an unexpected co-morbidity associated to the neurological manifestations of patients with vivax malaria [118] . In Papua, P. vivax-associated coma was rare, occurring 23 times less frequently than that seen with falciparum malaria, and was associated with a high proportion of non-malarial causes and mixed infections detected using PCR [119] .