Despite being preventable and curable , over 200 million people worldwide are infect with malaria . Sub - Saharan Africa carries a disproportionately high bit of these infection . While drug - resistive malaria has been put down in Southeast Asia , Africa has managed to evade it , until now it would seem .
A new newspaper , published in theNew England Journal of Medicine , has documented what the authors say is the first tape case of artemisinin - resistant malaria discovered in Africa . The patient , a Taiwanese national who recently returned from Equatorial Guinea , was admitted to the hospital in Jiangsu Province , China , where he had to be cover no less than six clip before he was cleared of the sponger .
What is concerning is that the strain of the malaria - causing agent , Plasmodium falciparum , was resistant to artemisinin combination therapy , which is often the first lineage of defense against the sponger and widely used across much of Africa . The fear now is that drug - insubordinate malaria is far more prevalent in the continent that anyone thought .
“ The spread head of artemisinin ohmic resistance in Africa would be a major reverse in the battle against malaria , as ACT ( artemisinin - based compounding therapy ) is the only effective and wide used antimalarial intervention at the moment , ” explain lead story author Arnab Pain , professor at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology , in astatement . “ Therefore , it is very important to regularly monitor artemisinin immunity worldwide . ”
This latest studycomes not long afteranother study that discover the first case of drug - resistant malaria in the UK . The four patient role involve in that sketch had also just returned from Africa , and at the prison term the doctors who treated them warned that this could be just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the preponderance of resistant malaria in the continent . It now looks likely that their worse concerns have come to make it .
The move now should be to have a wide - scale appraisal of people with malaria in Africa in ordination to sample and ascertain just how prevailing resistance may be . The fact that there has been little grounds up until the last few months for drug - resistant malaria in Africa is worrisome , as it may intimate that others have occurred but have simply not been account .
There is more than one line of defense against the disease , but doctors should be aware of what they are dealing with , peculiarly if they are treating patient who are either in Africa or have just returned from Africa . The next stage is to abuse up surveillance and to keep on top of the acquire situation .
