Deadly malaria that is resistant to drug treatment has spread rapidly from Cambodia to the border between Thailand and Myanmar, raising concerns of an uncontrollable epidemic, scientists said on Thursday.
A pair of studies published in the Lancet and the journal Science showed how the disease is moving fast into new territory and identified a region of the parasite’s genome that may be responsible for mutating in order to survive.
Malaria is a mosquito-borne disease commonly caused by a parasite, Plasmodium falciparum, that kills up to 1.2 million people a year, according to 2010 estimates by the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, Seattle.
Photo: EPA
Malaria that was resistant to treatment with the current standard therapy, artemisinin, was confirmed in Cambodia in 2006 and has since spread 800km westward to the Thailand-Myanmar border, the researchers said.
By studying 3,202 patients along the northwestern border of Thailand near Myanmar from 2001 and 2010 and measuring the time it took them to clear malaria infections from their blood after treatment, scientists were able to show a steady increase in drug resistance.
The number of slow-clearing infections rose from 0.6 percent of cases treated in 2001 to 20 percent in 2010.
In western Cambodia, 42 percent of malaria cases were resistant between 2007 and 2010, indicating that the Thailand-Myanmar region was swiftly catching up to Cambodia’s rates.
“Genetically determined artemisinin resistance in P. falciparum emerged along the Thailand-Myanmar border at least eight years ago and has since increased substantially,” the Lancet study said.
“At this rate of increase, resistance will reach rates reported in western Cambodia in two to six years,” it said.
The research in the journal Science focused on what was making these parasites different, and found that a region on chromosome 13 of the parasite was strongly associated with slow clearance of infection.
They sequenced the genomes of 91 P. falciparum parasites from Cambodia and western Thailand and compared them with parasites from Laos, where resistance to the latest artemisinin-based drugs has not yet emerged.
They found seven genes that may be responsible for making the parasite resistant to drugs and which may explain up to 35 percent of the growing resistance in Southeast Asia.
“We have now seen the emergence of malaria resistant to our best drugs, and these resistant parasites are not confined to western Cambodia,” said the study’s leader, Francois Nosten, director of the Shoklo Malaria Research Unit that studies and treats malaria in the Thai-Myanmar region.
“This is very worrying indeed and suggests that we are in a race against time to control malaria in these regions before drug resistance worsens and develops and spreads further,” Nosten said.
The death toll from malaria has been declining in Africa — the part of the world worst hit by the disease — in recent years, largely due to the increased use of artemisinin drugs and the widening distribution of insecticide-treated bed nets.
However, if resistance spreads to artemisinin therapies — used alone or taken in combination with other anti-malarials — some experts are concerned that a resurgence of drug-resistant malaria could return to Africa. Researchers say a new anti-malaria drug is not expected to appear on the world market before the next decade is up.
The two studies were funded by the Wellcome Trust and the US National Institutes of Health, and included scientists from Mahidol University, Bangkok; the Centre for Tropical Medicine at Britain’s Oxford University; and the Texas Biomedical Research Institute in the US.
Former Nicaraguan president Violeta Chamorro, who brought peace to Nicaragua after years of war and was the first woman elected president in the Americas, died on Saturday at the age of 95, her family said. Chamorro, who ruled the poor Central American country from 1990 to 1997, “died in peace, surrounded by the affection and love of her children,” said a statement issued by her four children. As president, Chamorro ended a civil war that had raged for much of the 1980s as US-backed rebels known as the “Contras” fought the leftist Sandinista government. That conflict made Nicaragua one of
BOMBARDMENT: Moscow sent more than 440 drones and 32 missiles, Volodymyr Zelenskiy said, in ‘one of the most terrifying strikes’ on the capital in recent months A nighttime Russian missile and drone bombardment of Ukraine killed at least 15 people and injured 116 while they slept in their homes, local officials said yesterday, with the main barrage centering on the capital, Kyiv. Kyiv City Military Administration head Tymur Tkachenko said 14 people were killed and 99 were injured as explosions echoed across the city for hours during the night. The bombardment demolished a nine-story residential building, destroying dozens of apartments. Emergency workers were at the scene to rescue people from under the rubble. Russia flung more than 440 drones and 32 missiles at Ukraine, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy
COMPETITION: The US and Russia make up about 90 percent of the world stockpile and are adding new versions, while China’s nuclear force is steadily rising, SIPRI said Most of the world’s nuclear-armed states continued to modernize their arsenals last year, setting the stage for a new nuclear arms race, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) said yesterday. Nuclear powers including the US and Russia — which account for about 90 percent of the world’s stockpile — had spent time last year “upgrading existing weapons and adding newer versions,” researchers said. Since the end of the Cold War, old warheads have generally been dismantled quicker than new ones have been deployed, resulting in a decrease in the overall number of warheads. However, SIPRI said that the trend was likely
‘SHORTSIGHTED’: Using aid as leverage is punitive, would not be regarded well among Pacific Island nations and would further open the door for China, an academic said New Zealand has suspended millions of dollars in budget funding to the Cook Islands, it said yesterday, as the relationship between the two constitutionally linked countries continues to deteriorate amid the island group’s deepening ties with China. A spokesperson for New Zealand Minister of Foreign Affairs Winston Peters said in a statement that New Zealand early this month decided to suspend payment of NZ$18.2 million (US$11 million) in core sector support funding for this year and next year as it “relies on a high trust bilateral relationship.” New Zealand and Australia have become increasingly cautious about China’s growing presence in the Pacific
RSS