Escenarios Regionales

doctorswithoutborders:

Over the past three years, MSF teams have witnessed a rather astonishing rise in the number of malaria cases in Democratic Republic of Congo. For its part, MSF is now responding to outbreaks in six separate provinces in the east and north of the country, but a wider, more concerted effort is urgently needed to battle this potentially fatal disease that traditionally afflicts the young and the infirm. Learn more.

Infographic by will owen

New Type Of Resistant Malaria Appears On Thai-Burmese Border

Malaria experts have been holding their breath and hoping it wouldn’t happen. But it has.

Malaria parasites resistant to the last, best drug treatment, called artemisinin combination therapy, or ACT, are infecting people along the border of Thailand and Myanmar.

This is 500 miles away from the first focus of ACT-resistant malaria in Cambodia. And it’s a different form of resistant malaria, which means it arose independently of the Cambodian type rather than spreading from there. We’re talking here about Plasmodium falciparum, the deadliest and most common form of malaria.

The discovery ruins the World Health Organization’s hope that resistance to ACT might be stamped out for good in Cambodia. Now it’s a two-front war.

An international team of researchers is publishing the news in The Lancet.

Meanwhile, many of the same scientists report in Science that they’ve zeroed in on changes in the parasite’s genes that drive this new form of resistance. That gives hope that its spread may be monitored and that new drugs might someday be devised to foil resistance.

But the bad news outweighs the good. The new resistance raises concern that the tantalizing prospect of eliminating malaria might slip away again, as it did when the parasite developed resistance to the drug chloroquine in the 1960s through the 1990s. More than 600,000 people die of malaria each year, but the toll has been falling.

Pictured: A micrograph shows red blood cells infected by the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum. John C. Tan/AP

Malaria deaths hugely underestimated - Lancet study

Worldwide malaria deaths may be almost twice as high as previously estimated, a study reports.

The research, published in the British medical journal the Lancet, suggest 1.24 million people died from the mosquito-borne disease in 2010.

This compares to a World Health Organisation (WHO) estimate for 2010 of 655,000 deaths.

But both the new study and the WHO indicate global death rates are now falling.

What we now know is that we’re actually able to turn off malaria using existing methods”

The research was funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It used new data and new computer modelling to build a historical database for malaria between 1980 and 2010.

The conclusion was that worldwide deaths had risen from 995,000 in 1980 to a peak of 1.82 million in 2004, before falling to 1.24 million in 2010.