What to do When Medicine is Failing to Help you?
Malaria Drugs are losing the impact with people from Southeast Asia
Malaria drugs are failing at a tumultuous rate in Southern Asia as the drug-persistent strain of the malaria parasite arise. These things are based on two new reports, one about a genetic study and the other on a randomized trial, release by The Lancet. The problem is concerning the fact that this could spread worldwide.
Global health officials get impatient when new strains of drug-resistant malaria show up in Southeast Asia, because it’s a feared pattern that they’ve meet before. The resistance that has emerged in this region has condemned last malaria medications since the middle of the 20th century. Arjen Dondorp, from the Mahidol Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit in Bangkok, said that in a way antimalarial drug resistance always began in that part of the world and that chloroquine resistance originated there.
It’s difficult to underscore the meaning of this fact and the reasons for this are complicated. Some scientists state that one reason could have something to do with the rather low levels of malaria there. When resistant parasites appear, they are not fighting against a strong nonresistant strain of malaria and are possibly capable to spread easier.
Right now, the World Health Organization recommends treating the majority malaria cases with artemisinin-based missing therapies, or ACT’s. These are usually single pills that mix fast-acting artemisinin with another longer-acting antimalarial drug. Also, one of the most widely used ACT’s worldwide is dihydroartemisinin-piperaquine, a combo that Dondorp found to be failing in Southeast Asia.
These drugs have been hugely effective at treating malaria, one of the world’s most troublesome diseases. World Health Organization stated the fact that each year there are more than 200 million cases of malaria and 400, 000 people die from it, mostly African children.
The two-drug artemisinin mix continues to be the first-line drugs for treating most malaria cases around the world, including Africa. And they have been credited with succeeding in stopping malaria spreading. But now, it looks like their future effectiveness is in question.
Dondorp, in the middle of research in the Mekong region, was comparing a new three-drug malaria treatment against the conventional two-drug artemisinin mix. And it was in the middle of that research that he and his colleagues noticed that the current antimalarial drugs weren’t greatly streaking out the possibly deadly parasites. The overall failure rate was 50 %, but in some parts of the region, the drugs weren’t functioning nine times out of 10. Dondorp also said the resistance was even worse than they’d expected.
So far this drug resistance has been mostly found in the areas around the Mekong Delta, but there’s no reason these parasites couldn’t spread to India or other regions of Asia or even Africa. However, the mutant malaria parasites that have created up resistance so far, to artemisinin-based drugs haven’t taken hold on the continent.
Tiesha loves to share her passion for everything that’s beautiful in this world. Apart from writing on her beauty blog and running her own beauty channel on Youtube, she also enjoys traveling and photography. Tiesha covers various stories on the website.
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