Drug-Resistant Strain of Malaria Spreads Across Myanmar
Drug-resistant malaria has been detected at the Myanmar-India border and now poses an "enormous threat" to global health, scientists have said, according to the BBC.
There are highly effective drugs called artemisinins - and now resistant malaria is turning up in parts of Myanmar, the reclusive country also known as Burma, where it hadn't been seen before.
The study was conducted by Dr. Charles Woodrow and his colleagues at the Mahidol-Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit in Bangkok.
"Particularly toward the north, resistance is certainly present as we highlight and now lies quite close to the Northwest border with India," Woodrow says.
"We can see artemisinin resistance is clearly present quite close to the Indian border, that's clearly a threat and in the future is likely to lead to extension of the problem to neighbouring areas."
Initially the other drug will pick up the slack to keep the combination effective, but Woodrow says this resistance will "inevitably" lead to it failing.
"If this were to spread into India, malaria will continue to affect rural populations there, but there may not be an immediate effect on cure-rate," he said. "But beyond the short term, there is very likely to be a problem, and there are very few [other] drugs on the table."
The study, published in the medical journal Lancet Infectious Diseases, is the result of field research conducted by Myanmar's Defense Service Medical Research Center.
