Headline : Africa: Growing Concern About Antimalarial Drug Resistance Sparks Calls for Urgent Action

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Partial resistance to a life-saving antimalarial drug has been detected in Uganda among children experiencing severe forms of the disease.

The findings of a new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) paint a worrying picture. The authors reported evidence of partial resistance to the antimalarial drug artemisinin among 11 out of 100 children treated for severe malaria at a hospital in Uganda. They found that, for these 11 children, it took longer than expected for the drug to kill the parasites within three days of treatment. In addition, once authors began to focus on drug resistance, they discovered patients who had experienced recurrent malaria, even after they were thought to have been cured.

This is a worrying development. As the first-line treatment for malaria, artemisinin and artemisinin-based combination therapies -- in which artemisinin is combined with partner drugs such as lumefantrine, mefloquine and amodiaquine -- are a crucial weapon against this disease.

There have been growing concerns about the rise of antimalarial drug resistance spreading across Africa. Resistance develops when the malaria-carrying parasite Plasmodium falciparum mutates, allowing the parasite to continue to survive until the drug concentration has reduced. The longer the parasite can stay alive in the body, the higher the chance the treatment can fail. In the case of malaria, this places children with severe malaria at a high risk of death.

Read more from the original article on here at allafrica.com.

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