Background

Malaria is a major public health problem in most trop-ical regions, and despite impressive reductions in the number of cases and deaths in the last decades, malaria resulted in an estimated 207 million episodes and 627,000 deaths in 2012 [1]. Although the attention of the scientific community has focused in past decades on the burden and consequences of P. falciparum infections [2,3], in recent years there has been a renewed interest in P. vivax-associated morbidity, as a result of the increasing report of its potential hazards to health [4-7]. P. vivax is the most geographically widespread parasite causing malaria in humans, with over 2.5 billion individ-uals exposed to the risk of infection; it is the predominant species in Latin America and some areas of the Asian and Pacific regions [1,8]. In a context of renewed and intensi