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The World Health Organisation
leads the battle being waged along the Thai-Cambodian border against
tolerance to artemisinin, the best available
drug to treat malaria. Committed experts, partners and the Thai and
Cambodian governments are engaged.
They persist in the fight because spread of the danger
would knock back years of global efforts and imperil the world's poorest
in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa
where incidence and deaths are highest, especially among children.
Due to increasing free access to still performing ACT
and LLINs, especially in Africa,
global malaria mortality is decreasing but half the world population is
still at risk. China
struggled with several pockets of malaria on the mainland until its own
scientists extracted as an anti-malarial artemisinin,
the shrub that is indigenous to the country. Hainan
Island and Yunnan now remain problem areas.
Alarm bells rang recently when signs of tolerance
appeared on the Thai-Cambodian border, with the lengthening of the
clearance period of parasites, from the initial 48 hours to a few days.
This sparked the Containment Project in seven provinces in eastern Thailand and 10 in western Cambodia.
The project aims to reduce and eventually eliminate
deadly falciparum malaria with a strategy that
calls for better prevention, more research, less use of artemisinin monotherapies,
and increasing engagement of private providers to provide quality
diagnosis and medicines, among others.
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