Malaria Developing Resistance to Drugs

Posted on 17. Sep, 2010 by Mark in Global Health Clues

The World Health Organization has warned last year about parasites developing resistance against the new drug artemisinin. It first emerged between Cambodia and Thailand and is now slowly spreading.
Through the years, artemisinin has been largely praised because of the increasing recovery rates for malaria cases. This mosquito transmitted disease kills almost one million people all over the world.

The drug resistance was first discovered in Western Cambodia back in 2007 and since then, have been observed in other parts of the region as well. There have been cases of drug resistance to artemisinin in Souther Myanmar, the Chinese-Myanmar border, as well as in Southern Vietnam near Cambodia.
WHO is worried that the emergence of the resistance could “seriously undermine” the efforts of bringing malaria under control.

Artemisinin has been used to replace older drugs that have been able to develop resistance against the drugs. The best strategy to avoid this growing resistance is to eliminate any fake or substandard medicine that increases resistance.