Malaria threat as drug-resistant parasites spread towards Africa
Resistance to world's top treatment drug is spreading towards Africa, study warns - and if it gets there, millions of lives will be at risk
Parasites resistant to the frontline malaria drug have spread westward from Southeast Asia to just short of the Indian border - a gateway to Africa, researchers warned yesterday.
A spread into India "would pose a serious threat to the global control and eradication of malaria", said a study published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases.
"If drug resistance spreads from Asia to the African sub-continent, or emerges in Africa independently as we've seen several times before, millions of lives will be at risk." Since the plasmodium parasite developed resistance to other drug types, artemisinin remained the best and safest medicine to treat the estimated 198 million malaria infections that occurred worldwide in 2013.
There were about 584,000 deaths, according to the UN's World Health Organisation (WHO) - 90 per cent of them in Africa.
Artemisinin resistance has not yet been detected in Africa, but is a growing problem in Southeast Asian nations such as Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam. It is also suspected - though not proven - to have taken hold in South America.
Myanmar, which carries the region's highest malaria burden, is considered the parasite's main route from Southeast Asia to India and beyond.
For the study, researchers collected samples from patients at 55 treatment centres across Myanmar and border regions of Thailand and Bangladesh in 2013 and 2014, and examined them for telltale mutations in the K13, or "kelch", gene.