Southeast Asia has historically been a graveyard for malaria
drugs.
In the 1960s, malaria parasites in Thailand learned how to
fend off chloroquine, a first-line malaria drug. That resistance eventually spread
around the globe.
In sub-Saharan Africa, the loss of chloroquine cost hundreds
of thousands of lives.
A new study finds a disturbing trend in the battle against
malaria. There are highly effective drugs called artemisinins — and now
resistant malaria is turning up in parts of Myanmar, the reclusive country also
known as Burma, where it hadn’t been seen before.
The study was conducted by Dr. Charles Woodrow and his
colleagues at the Mahidol-Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit in Bangkok.
“Particularly toward the north, resistance is certainly
present as we highlight and now lies quite close to the Northwest border with
India,” Woodrow says.
There’s concern that if the resistance takes root in India,
it could quickly jump to other parts of the world.
Studies like this one in Myanmar show that artemisinin
resistance is growing. And this is a huge problem, because malaria, according
to the World Health Organization, sickens almost 200 million people a year and
kills roughly 600,000.
1 comment:
An outstanding share! I've just forwarded this onto
a colleague who was doing a little research on this.
And he in fact bought me dinner due to the fact that I found it for him...
lol. So allow me to reword this.... Thank YOU for the meal!!
But yeah, thanks for spending the time to talk about this topic here on your site.
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