Shots - Health Blog Thu April 5, 2012 New Type Of Resistant
Malaria Appears On Thai-Burmese Border Malaria experts have been
holding their breath and hoping it wouldn't happen. But it has.
Malaria parasites resistant to the last, best drug treatment,
called artemisinin combination therapy, or ACT, are infecting
people along the border of Thailand and Myanmar. This is 500
miles away from the first focus of ACT-resistant malaria in
Cambodia. And it's a different form of resistant malaria, which
means it arose independently of the Cambodian type rather than
spreading from there. We're talking here about Plasmodium
falciparum, the deadliest and most common form of malaria. The
discovery ruins the World Health Organization's hope that
resistance to ACT might be stamped out for good in Cambodia. Now
it's a two-front war. An international team of researchers is
publishing the news in The Lancet. Meanwhile, many of the same
scientists report in Science that they've zeroed in on changes
in the parasite's genes that dr