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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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