A man in his 70s from Nigeria was visiting relatives in Canada when he landed in the hospital with fluid around his heart. Within days, he was on a ventilator, and the standard blood tests for malaria kept coming back negative.
The answer finally came from a laboratory test built to identify bacteria, not parasites. Run on heart fluid that had been drained weeks earlier, it picked up DNA from a tiny structure inside the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum.
