A ProdMED-mail Post
O'treng village doesn't look like the epicenter of anything. Just off
a muddy rutted-out road, it is nothing more than a handful of
Khmer-style bamboo huts perched crookedly on stilts, tucked among a
tangle of cornfields once littered with deadly land mines. Yet this
spot on the Thai-Cambodian border is home to a form of malaria that
keeps rendering one powerful drug after another useless.
This time, scientists have confirmed the 1st signs of resistance to
the only affordable treatment left in the global medicine cabinet for
malaria: artemisinin.
If this drug stops working, there's no good replacement to combat a
disease that kills one million annually. As a result, earlier this
year [2009], international medical leaders declared resistant malaria
here a health emergency.
"This is not business as usual. It's something really special, and it
needs a real concerted effort," said Dr. Nick White, a malaria expert
at Mahidol University in Bangkok who has spent decades trying to
eradicate the disease from Southeast Asia...
Mosquitoes spread this resistant malaria quickly from shack to shack,
village to village, and eventually country to country...People generate drug resistant malaria when they take too little medicine, substandard medicine or -- as is all too often the case
around O'treng -- counterfeit medicine with a pinch of the real
stuff. Once established, the drug-resistant malaria is spread by
mosquitoes. So one person's counterfeit medicine can eventually spawn
widespread resistant disease.
A recent study out of neighboring Laos found 88 percent of stores
selling artemisinin-based drugs, the same ones scientists are
desperately trying to preserve, were actually peddling fakes. Worse,
nearly 15 percent of the counterfeits were laced with small hints of
artemisinin, which could prompt resistance. The researchers found
indications that some were made in China, feeding smugglers' routes
that snake through Myanmar and into Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Viet
Nam.
The counterfeits, along with outdated drugs, are jumping continents.
In Africa, where malaria is endemic in 45 countries, the fake drug
industry is thriving. A 2003 World Health Organization survey found
between 20 percent and 90 percent of antimalarials randomly purchased
in 7 African countries failed quality testing, depending on the type
of drug.
WHO and Interpol formed a task force 3 years ago to try to stop
counterfeiters, seizing millions of fake malaria, tuberculosis, HIV
and other pills in Southeast Asia and Africa. But officials say the
work is only as good as the countries' legal systems.
With no new treatments in the pipeline, normally reserved scientists
are quick to use words like "disaster" or "catastrophe" when asked
what might happen if they don't contain the disease that's ravaging
this boy... before it spreads to Africa. There, malaria already kills an
estimated 2000 kids daily.
Source: The Associated Press cited by CTV [edited]
<http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/
Photos From:
NationalGeographic.com
O'treng village doesn't look like the epicenter of anything. Just offa muddy rutted-out road, it is nothing more than a handful of
Khmer-style bamboo huts perched crookedly on stilts, tucked among a
tangle of cornfields once littered with deadly land mines. Yet this
spot on the Thai-Cambodian border is home to a form of malaria that
keeps rendering one powerful drug after another useless.
This time, scientists have confirmed the 1st signs of resistance to
the only affordable treatment left in the global medicine cabinet for
malaria: artemisinin.
If this drug stops working, there's no good replacement to combat a
disease that kills one million annually. As a result, earlier this
year [2009], international medical leaders declared resistant malaria
here a health emergency.
"This is not business as usual. It's something really special, and it
needs a real concerted effort," said Dr. Nick White, a malaria expert
at Mahidol University in Bangkok who has spent decades trying to
eradicate the disease from Southeast Asia...
Mosquitoes spread this resistant malaria quickly from shack to shack,village to village, and eventually country to country...People generate drug resistant malaria when they take too little medicine, substandard medicine or -- as is all too often the case
around O'treng -- counterfeit medicine with a pinch of the real
stuff. Once established, the drug-resistant malaria is spread by
mosquitoes. So one person's counterfeit medicine can eventually spawn
widespread resistant disease.
A recent study out of neighboring Laos found 88 percent of stores
selling artemisinin-based drugs, the same ones scientists are
desperately trying to preserve, were actually peddling fakes. Worse,
nearly 15 percent of the counterfeits were laced with small hints of
artemisinin, which could prompt resistance. The researchers found
indications that some were made in China, feeding smugglers' routes
that snake through Myanmar and into Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Viet
Nam.
The counterfeits, along with outdated drugs, are jumping continents.
In Africa, where malaria is endemic in 45 countries, the fake drug
industry is thriving. A 2003 World Health Organization survey found
between 20 percent and 90 percent of antimalarials randomly purchased
in 7 African countries failed quality testing, depending on the type
of drug.
WHO and Interpol formed a task force 3 years ago to try to stop
counterfeiters, seizing millions of fake malaria, tuberculosis, HIV
and other pills in Southeast Asia and Africa. But officials say the
work is only as good as the countries' legal systems.
With no new treatments in the pipeline, normally reserved scientists
are quick to use words like "disaster" or "catastrophe" when asked
what might happen if they don't contain the disease that's ravaging
this boy... before it spreads to Africa. There, malaria already kills an
estimated 2000 kids daily.
Source: The Associated Press cited by CTV [edited]
<http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/
Photos From:
NationalGeographic.com
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