Dec. 28 – A new, increasingly drug-resistant form of malaria has sprung up along the border of Cambodia and Thailand a new report by the Associated Press states.
“This spot on the Thai-Cambodian border is home to a form of malaria that keeps rendering one powerful drug after another useless. This time, scientists have confirmed the first signs of resistance to the only affordable treatment left in the global medicine cabinet for malaria: Artemisinin.”
Malaria is just one of the leading killer infectious diseases battling back in a new and more deadly form, the AP found in a six-month look at the soaring rates of drug resistance worldwide. After decades of the overuse and misuse of antibiotics, diseases like malaria, tuberculosis and staph have started to mutate. The result: The drugs manufactured to combat the diseases are slowly becoming less and less effective.
Resistance to malaria has spread faster and wider than previously documented. Dr. Nick White, a malaria expert at Mahidol University in Bangkok told the AP that virtually every case of malaria he sees in western Cambodia is now resistant to drugs. And in the Pailin area, patients given artemisinin take twice as long as those elsewhere to be clear of the parasite — 84 hours instead of the typical 48, and sometimes even 96 says the AP report.
Mosquitoes are spreading the disease quickly from shack to shack and village to village in Cambodia. And so, the AP writes, the village of O’treng on the Thai-Cambodia border, finds itself at the epicenter of a worldwide effort to stop a dangerous new version of an old disease.
