Spread of Malaria Feared as Drug Loses Potency

[Coventina]

Source: New York Times

TASANH, Cambodia — The afflictions of this impoverished nation are on full display in its western corner: the girls for hire outside restaurants, the badly rutted dirt roads and the ubiquitous signs that warn “Danger Mines!”

But what eludes the naked eye is a potentially graver problem, especially for the outside world. The parasite that causes the deadliest form of malaria is showing the first signs of resistance to the best new drug against it.

Combination treatments using artemisinin, an antimalaria drug extracted from a plant used in traditional Chinese medicine, have been hailed in recent years as the biggest hope for eradicating malaria from Africa, where more than 2,000 children die from the disease each day.

Now a series of studies, including one recently published in The New England Journal of Medicine and one due out soon, have cemented a consensus among researchers that artemisinin is losing its potency here and that increased efforts are needed to prevent the drug-resistant malaria from leaving here and spreading across the globe.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/27/health/27malaria.html?ref=science