Best way to treat malaria: Avoid using same drug for everyone,
scientists say Posted September 5, 2008; 10:53 a.m. A team of
scientists employing a sophisticated computer model pioneered at
Princeton University and Resources for the Future has found that
many governments worldwide are recommending the wrong kind of
malaria treatment. Despite the availability of many drugs and
therapies to treat malaria, many countries' national policies
recommend using what is known as a single first-line therapy --
that is, using one drug repeatedly with many patients. Writing
in the Sept. 16 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy
of Sciences, a team led by Maciej Boni, who conducted the
research as a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton and scholar at
Resources, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, reports that
countries could cut the death rate and forestall the development
of drug resistance if a variety of different drugs were
distributed to patients. This approach, known as multiple first-
line therapies or MFT, co