As feared, malaria is getting worse

by Alanna Shaikh · 2009-01-13 19:22:00 UTC
Topics:

guy spraying for mosquitoes

(photo credit: Ixtla)

I just picked this up in my RSS reader:

A deadly strain of malaria along the Thai-Cambodian border is becoming increasingly immune to treatment, threatening the global effort to end malaria, new evidence shows.

This new strain is resistant to both artemisinin, one of the key drugs in artemisinin combination therapy (ACT), and the combination therapy. Artemisinin resistance is unfortunately not new; resistance to the ACT combo is. The therapy now takes up to 120 hours to work, which is too long. The WHO has recommended a new therapy for malaria for 2009. (This decision was apparently made in October, but I swear I didn’t know this already when I wrote my Global Health Predictions)

We’ll see how the new combination therapy goes. With malaria therapy, though, it is a constant race against resistance. Because malaria is so prevalent in low-income areas with little access to health care, people do a lot of self-treating. Guessing about drugs and dosages really doesn’t work, and the malaria parasite grows resistant to available drugs as a result.

This means that malaria is also part of the great prevention vs treatment debate, just like HIV/AIDS. In the case of malaria, the prevention is mosquito-barring bednets and using insecticides. If drug therapies are increasingly expensive and ineffective, it might be time to focus more on bednets and indoor residual spraying.

Alanna Shaikh
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