Traditionally, Brazil has been responsible for almost half of all cases of malaria in Latin America. In 2009, 308,498 cases of malaria were reported in this country (257,571 caused by P. vivax), representing 54.9% of all the malaria reported in the Americas [15] . Cases are virtually restricted to the Amazon Basin (constituted by the states of Amazonas, Acre, Roraima, Amapá, Pará, Tocantins, Rondônia, and parts of Mato Grosso and Maranhão). Amazonian urban agglomerations under continuous economical development trigger intense migration flows, such as in the city of Manaus (in the Western Brazilian Amazon), helping to maintain the disease under endemic levels [16, 17] . Malaria in Brazil is mostly related to P. vivax since the 1990s, when the available tools for control at the moment were put together and intensified, such as the fast diagnosis through thick blood smear (TBS) in all febrile patients, and free access to anti-malarials, integrated through a decentralized primary care-centred public health system [18] . Allied to that, an active community of local malariologists has been persistently identifying the profile of anti-malarial resistance with permanent counseling to the Brazilian Ministry of Health, which responds promptly to these evidences, changing the first line regimens [19] . As the sexual forms (which are infective for the vector) of P. falciparum generally appear later in the course of infection, opportune diagnosis and treatment tend to have a high impact on reducing the transmission intensity of this species but the same is not true for P. vivax, whose gametocytes are present in the very first days of the infection, before efficacious treatment is usually started. In 2008, 59% of all malaria cases registered in the Brazilian Amazon were treated in the first 48 h after appearance of symptoms (SIVEP-Malaria, 2009). These public health measures allied to a regularly updated online information system also impacted the number of deaths related to P. falciparum, which were not more than 58 in 2009 (Brazilian Ministry of Health, 2010). As a consequence, even in the non-indexed literature, severity due to P. falciparum is not frequently reported anymore in Brazil.