SASTM Newsflash
MALARIA, ARTEMISININ RESISTANCE-SOUTHEAST
While the communicable disease wreaks its heaviest toll in Africa, it's in nations along the
The availability of therapies using the drug artemisinin has helped cut global malaria deaths by a quarter in the past decade. But resistance to it emerged on the Thai-Cambodia border in 2003, and has since been confirmed in
The report warns that could be a health catastrophe in the making, as no alternative anti-malarial drug is on the horizon. The UN World Health Organization, or WHO, is warning that what seems to be a localized threat could easily get out of control and have serious implications for global health. "Absent elimination of the malaria parasite in the Mekong, it is only a matter of time before artemisinin resistance becomes the global norm, reversing the recent gains," writes Dr Christopher Daniel, former commander of the US Naval Medical Research Center, in the report for a conference at the
Mosquitoes have developed resistance [it is the malaria parasite which develops resistance, not the mosquito] to antimalarial drugs before. The same happened with the drug chloroquine, which helped eliminate malaria from Europe, North America, the Caribbean, and parts of Asia and
Nowhere are the challenges in countering the threat to drug-resistance greater than in
In a third of townships, there been virtually no public health presence for years. It's an issue of regional concern as
factors: delays in giving treatment, use of counterfeit or substandard drugs, and prescribing artemisinin on its own rather than in combination with another longer-acting drug to ensure that all malaria-carrying parasites in a patient's bloodstream are killed off.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies is advocating greater
Communicated by: ProMED
[The emergence of artemisinin resistance in
We have previously argued that the development of resistance is best contained by providing the population with free malaria drugs ensuring a full course of treatment with drugs which contain the active compounds in the required doses (Schlagenhauf P, Petersen E: Antimalaria drug resistance: the mono-combi-counterfeit triangle. Expert Rev Anti Infect Ther. 2009; 7(9): 1039-42). Free drugs are provided to patients with HIV and tuberculosis and should be provided to malaria patients as well to remove the market for counterfeit and substandard drugs.
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