The reason attributed is over usage of the Drug which has made the parasite immune to the medication.
Frequent and over usage of Antibiotics and drugs of any nature spoils one’s health and the bacteria/virus becomes drug resistant.
Allow the body immune system reasonable time to take action by itself.
There are fears the disease could be spreading after a strain of Plasmodium falciparum has been discovered on the border of Thailand and Burma – 500 miles away from western Cambodia, where the first cases of the parasite were reported in 2009.
Tests by a team of British and Thai scientists over a 10-year period have found the most dangerous species of malaria parasites, spread by mosquitoes, are becoming more resistant to the most effective treatments containing artemisinin, a drug derived from the sweet wormwood shrub.
Report in Lancet.
- “Study leader Professor Francois Nosten, director of the Shoklo Malaria Research Unit in Thailand, warned of a “race against time” to halt the spread of the potentially untreatable malaria.
He told Sky News: “If the situation continues to deteriorate then it could mean that the newest drugs that we have to treat malaria now which are the derivatives of artemisinin, will be progressively inefficient, ineffective.
“We know what the consequences of this will be because we have seen it in the past… it results in increasing number of cases of malaria and therefore more deaths, and so we are very concerned.”
“It is not a new strain. It is the same species of parasite, but it is evolving rapidly.
“The reason why it has evolved resistance to new treatments is probably because we have been using them a lot over the last 20 years. They were the only treatments that could effectively cure the disease.
“We can still treat the patient with these drugs and they get better and they get cured, it just takes longer for them to clear the disease.
“We don’t know yet whether this is a spreading phenomenon – whether this resistance has spread from Cambodia to the Thai-Burma border, or whether it is emerging spontaneously.”
He said: “We have now seen the emergence of malaria resistant to our best drugs, and these resistant parasites are not confined to western Cambodia.
“This is very worrying indeed and suggests that we are in a race against time to control malaria in these regions before drug resistance worsens and develops and spreads further. The effect of that happening could be devastating.