Upon the release of the October issue of The Lancet, among the world’s premier medial journals, the media has been abuzz with a new strain of drug-resistant Malaria taking hold that’s now reached the south of Vietnam encompassing all four countries of the Eastern Greater Mekong subregion.
It’s a particularly problematic strain of malaria, known as PfPailin. This so-called “superbug” cannot be treated with first-line anti-malarial drugs. The strain emerged a few years ago in Cambodia, and has since spread to Thailand and Laos. Now, as a team of experts point out in a letter to The Lancet, the drug-resistant strain has spread from Cambodia into the Mekong sub-region of Vietnam, where infected patients are experiencing “alarming rates of failure.” In southeast Asia, drug treatment failure rates (failure meaning that drugs are ineffective at curbing the effects of malaria, such as fever, mild jaundice, organ problems, anemia, seizures, coma, and in the most severe cases death) are now approaching 60 percent. The World Health Organization claims that 1.5 million people are infected with malaria in southeast Asia annually, resulting in over 600 deaths.
The spread of artemisinin resistance in Plasmodium falciparum [the parasite that causes malaria] and the subsequent loss of partner antimalarial drugs in the Greater Mekong subregion presents one of the greatest threats to the control and elimination of malaria,” write the authors of The Lancet letter. The evolution and subsequent transnational spread of this single fit multidrug-resistant malaria parasite lineage is of international concern.
Read more from The Lancet, World Health Organization and Gizmod
