The rapid spread of “super malaria” in South-East Asia is an alarming global threat, scientists have warned.
This dangerous form of the malaria parasite cannot be killed with existing anti-malarial drugs, the BBC reported on Saturday.
It emerged in Cambodia but has since spread through parts of Thailand, Laos and has arrived in southern Vietnam.
The team at the Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit in Bangkok said there was a real danger of malaria becoming untreatable.
Professor Arjen Dondorp, the head of the unit, told the BBC: “We think it is a serious threat. It is alarming that this strain is spreading so quickly through the whole region and we fear it can spread further [and eventually] jump to Africa.”
In a letter, published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases , the researchers detailed the “recent sinister development” that has seen resistance to the drug artemisinin emerge.
Major killer of children
About 212 million people are infected with malaria each year. It is caused by a parasite that is spread by blood-sucking mosquitoes and is a major killer of children, the BBC has reported.
The first choice treatment for malaria is artemisinin in combination with piperaquine.
But as artemisinin has become less effective, the parasite has now evolved to resist piperaquine too.
There have now been “alarming rates of failure,” the letter said.
Professor Dondorp said the treatment was failing around a third of the time in Vietnam while in some regions of Cambodia the failure rate was closer to 60 per cent.
Could be cataclysm in Africa
Resistance to the drugs would be catastrophic in Africa, where 92 per cent of all malaria cases happen.
