Resistance to malaria drugs spreading in Southeast Asia
Experts warn resistance to current drugs used to treat malaria is growing and alternatives are not available
International experts raised the alarm on Tuesday over the spread of drug-resistant malaria in several Southeast Asian countries, saying it endangers major global gains in fighting the mosquito-borne disease that kills more than 600,000 people each year.
While the disease wreaks its heaviest toll in Africa, it’s in nations along the Mekong River where the most serious threat to treating it has emerged.
The availability of therapies using the drug artemisinin has helped cut global malaria deaths by a quarter in the past decade. But over the same period, resistance to the drug emerged on Thailand’s borders with Myanmar and Cambodia and has spread. It has been detected in southern Vietnam and probably exists in southern Laos, said Professor Nick White of the Thailand-based Mahidol Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit.
White, a leading authority on the subject, said that while there’s no confirmed evidence of resistance in Africa, there’s plenty of risk of transmission by air travellers from affected countries, such as construction labourers, aid workers or soldiers serving on peacekeeping missions.
“We have to take a radical approach to this. It’s like a cancer that’s spreading and we have to take it out now,” White told a conference at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies think tank in Washington. No alternative anti-malarial drug is on the horizon, he said.
“Once it reaches a higher level of resistance where the drugs don’t work, we are technically stuffed.”
The UN World Health Organisation, or WHO, is also warning that what seems to be a localised threat could easily get out of control and have serious implications for global health.