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Drug-resistant malaria now a health emergency
Source: Agencies |
December 29, 2009, Tuesday
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O'TRENG village in Cambodia does not look like the epicenter of anything.
Just off a muddy, rutted-out road, it is nothing more than a handful of Khmer-style bamboo huts perched crookedly on stilts, tucked among a tangle of cornfields once littered with deadly land mines.
Yet this spot on the Thai-Cambodian border is home to a form of malaria that keeps rendering one powerful drug after another useless. This time, scientists have confirmed the first signs of resistance to the only affordable treatment left in the global medicine cabinet for malaria: Artemisinin.
If this drug should stop working, there would be no good replacement to combat a disease that kills 1 million people annually. As a result, international medical leaders declared this year that resistant malaria there is a health emergency.
"This is not business as usual. It's something really special, and it needs a real concerted effort," said Dr Nick White, a malaria expert at Mahidol University in Bangkok, who has spent decades trying to eradicate the disease from Southeast Asia.
"We know that children have been dying in Africa - millions of children have died over the past three decades - and a lot of those deaths have been attributed to drug resistance. And we know that the drug resistance came from the same place."
Malaria is just one of the leading killer infectious diseases battling back in a new and more deadly form, the AP found in a six-month look at the soaring rates of drug resistance worldwide. After decades of the overuse and misuse of antibiotics, diseases like malaria, tuberculosis and staph have started to mutate. The result: The drugs are slowly dying.
Already, resistance to malaria has spread faster and wider than previously documented. Dr White said virtually every case of malaria he sees in western Cambodia is now resistant to drugs. And in the Pailin area, patients given artemisinin take twice as long as those elsewhere to be clear of the parasite - 84 hours instead of the typical 48, and sometimes even 96.
Mosquitoes spread this resistant malaria quickly from shack to shack, village to village, eventually country to country.
So, O'treng finds itself at the epicenter of an increasingly desperate worldwide effort to stop a dangerous new version of an old disease.
Just off a muddy, rutted-out road, it is nothing more than a handful of Khmer-style bamboo huts perched crookedly on stilts, tucked among a tangle of cornfields once littered with deadly land mines.
Yet this spot on the Thai-Cambodian border is home to a form of malaria that keeps rendering one powerful drug after another useless. This time, scientists have confirmed the first signs of resistance to the only affordable treatment left in the global medicine cabinet for malaria: Artemisinin.
If this drug should stop working, there would be no good replacement to combat a disease that kills 1 million people annually. As a result, international medical leaders declared this year that resistant malaria there is a health emergency.
"This is not business as usual. It's something really special, and it needs a real concerted effort," said Dr Nick White, a malaria expert at Mahidol University in Bangkok, who has spent decades trying to eradicate the disease from Southeast Asia.
"We know that children have been dying in Africa - millions of children have died over the past three decades - and a lot of those deaths have been attributed to drug resistance. And we know that the drug resistance came from the same place."
Malaria is just one of the leading killer infectious diseases battling back in a new and more deadly form, the AP found in a six-month look at the soaring rates of drug resistance worldwide. After decades of the overuse and misuse of antibiotics, diseases like malaria, tuberculosis and staph have started to mutate. The result: The drugs are slowly dying.
Already, resistance to malaria has spread faster and wider than previously documented. Dr White said virtually every case of malaria he sees in western Cambodia is now resistant to drugs. And in the Pailin area, patients given artemisinin take twice as long as those elsewhere to be clear of the parasite - 84 hours instead of the typical 48, and sometimes even 96.
Mosquitoes spread this resistant malaria quickly from shack to shack, village to village, eventually country to country.
So, O'treng finds itself at the epicenter of an increasingly desperate worldwide effort to stop a dangerous new version of an old disease.
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