Steve Baragona in VOA News: From Vietnam to Burma, the leading drug against malaria is losing potency, according to a new study in the New England Journal of Medicine. On the plus side, the same issue of the journal reports that a new antimalarial drug looks promising in an early test.Artemisinin-based drugs have helped make dramatic gains against malaria worldwide. “If we lose this class of drugs, it’s really going to be a global health catastrophe,” said Dr. Chris Plowe at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. “There’s nothing on the shelf that’s ready to replace those.”
Plowe and colleagues studied resistance rates in seven Asian and three African countries. The worst problems were along the Thailand-Cambodia border, where the first artemisinin drug failures were reported. But they found significant resistance from southern Vietnam to central Burma.
The fact that it’s on the move in Southeast Asia “speaks to the possibility that from there it can jump into Africa, which is the big concern, ultimately,” said Columbia University microbiologist David Fidock, who was not involved in the research. That’s what happened with resistance to previous malaria drugs, and it cost countless lives.
In fact, Plowe said that part of the world has proved to be a drug-resistant malaria hotspot. “It’s happened again and again, with at least four different antimalarial drugs, where resistant parasites popped up along the border between Thailand and Cambodia,” he said....
Iwona Tesarowicz of B. Oleksyn laboratory made this image of artemisinin's molecular structure. Public domain
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