Malaria Parasites Are Not Completely Resistent in Children in Southeast Asia, and Treatment is Needed More Than 10 Years, a Study by Haldar
Scientists in Africa and Southeast Asia are studying whether prescribing an additional — third — malaria medication might combat the partial resistance. In addition to the medication options that already exist, Haldar says the study shows “a greater need for new treatment.” She says that there is no new drug currently in development that will take artemisinin’s place.
Malaria parasites begin to replicate in your body after you are bitten by a mosquito. That is where artemisinin comes in. It can kill most of the parasites in a patient’s blood within hours. But now, Namazzi has been seeing patients where the drug takes several days to work.
She says it’s more difficult to understand the parasites in Southeast Asia than in Africa due to their lower drug resistance profiles.
According to the researchers, there are signs that kids are resistant to the oral anti-malarial drug artemether lumefantrine. The drug will help make sure there are no parasites in the body. But about 10% of the patients that doctors thought were better showed up sick again, within a month.
Children with severe malaria have evidence of drug resistance, according to the director of Indiana University’s Ryan White Center for Infectious Diseases and Global Health. He co-authored the study, which was published on Thursday in the medical journal JAMA and presented at the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene’s annual conference. “The reason this is important is because those children with severe malaria are at the highest risk for death.”
“These are very critically ill children,” she says, explaining that children are at greater risk of severe malaria than adults because they have not yet gained immunity. In a child with Severe Malaria, there can be a wide range of issues, from a high fever, convulsions, anemia, and respiratory distress to more severe issues. “A child can become extremely weak. They can’t eat their own food.
The authors were worried that the study found that it took longer for artemisinin to kill half the parasites in the bloodstream for 11 children. These kids are considered to have partial drug resistance under the rules of the World Health Organization. The kids eventually got better, so it’s not complete resistance. “Think about it, for any infection, more than 10 out of 100 people you treat don’t get better [quickly]. Haldar says that it’s really bad.
She says they voice their concern aboutMalaria between treating patients. It isn’t responding to treatment.
For years, Namazzi — who is also a lecturer at Makerere University College of Health Sciences — has turned to a medication called artemisinin. The drug is derived from an ancient Chinese malaria treatment that was rediscovered several decades ago and has saved millions of lives. It made such a profound difference that one of the people who helped revive the medical recipe received a Nobel prize for her work.
“It works like magic, it’s what I mean,” says Namazzi. Parasite clearance was fast, compared to other drugs. It had fewer problems. The mortality was low.
She wanted to understand what was going on. So she teamed up with others to figure it out. They had several hypotheses: Maybe the dose is too small or perhaps the patients aren’t completing the full medication course.
The Malaria Effects on the Children of Africa: Understanding the Implications for Malaria Prevention and Management in the Diagnosis of Children in Africa
Malaria kills more than half a million people each year, most of them are young children in Africa. African children with severe Malaria have not been documented with signs of resistance before. There are between one and five million children that are affected by malaria every year in Africa. The children have few other options for treatment of malaria compared to patients with uncomplicated Malaria.