Malaria remains one of the world’s great unnecessary killers.
More than 650,000 people succumb to the disease each year —
that’s more than one per minute — mostly in the poor nations of
sub-Saharan Africa, but as deadly as malaria is, it doesn’t have
to kill. Prevention and better treatment can stop the
progression of the disease, and death tends to be a matter of
extreme poverty. Indeed, in recent years great progress has been
made in controlling malaria, with deaths down 30% over the past
decade. That’s thanks largely to more effective treatment
regimens that make use of artemisinin, a plant-derived
antimalarial drug originally developed in China. Artemisinin is
the closest thing we have to a miracle drug for malaria. That’s
what makes the results of two studies out this week in the
Lancet and Science so disturbing. Health officials have known
for a while that some malaria parasites in the Southeast Asian
nation of Cambodia have begun to develop resistance to
artemisinin, but they hoped the resistance wasn’