United States: Every year, over almost 600,000 people around the world who are actually dying from malaria, with most of these deaths being children who are under the age of 5 years old. The problem is getting worse and even more intense because this malaria parasite may be becoming resistant to artemisinin, the medicine that is most often used to treat it. This makes it harder to save lives, especially young children.
“This is the first study from Africa demonstrating that children with malaria and signs of severe disease receive partial protection from artemisinin,” School of Medicine’s Dr.Chandy John, gte-director of I.U.’s Ryan White Center for Infectious Diseases and Global Health based in Indianapolis said.
As reported by the HealthDay, “It is also the first study that demonstrates that the subsequent high rate of African children with severe malaria is developing a new episode with the same strain in the next 28 days of treatment with artesunate, a form of artemisinin, and an ACT,” John explained.
The findings were described on Thursday at the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene in New Orleans. These results were made available for public use in the Journal of the American Medical Association at the same time.
The researchers in a meeting news release said that the artemisinin therapies that began two decades ago dramatically changed malaria treatment.
While plasmodium falciparum, the cocktailed parasite that brings about malaria had developed resistances to standard medication, artemisinin could give a quick cure.
But by 2008 there are indications that P. falciparum had also begun to develop resistance to the new drug. Partial resistance was seen in Cambodia and by 2013, there were reported cases where the drug did not help patients infected with the disease at all.
John and collaborators said in the new study that there was partial resistance to artemisinin in 11 of 100 children in Uganda. The number of minutes it took the treatment to clear the children off the parasite also took much longer in many of the cases.
These children were aged between 6 months and12years, and all the children were admitted for complicated malaria meaning, malaria with any feature of danger signs including among others anemia and/or complications affecting the brain.