Key malaria drug fails to treat patients in the UK for the first time
For the first time in the UK, a key malaria treatment has failed to cure four patients, all of whom visited Africa, showing early warning signs that the parasite is developing resistance against the drug, doctors said.
The drug combination was unable to treat four patients who all visited Africa. A team at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine said it was too early to panic.But it warned things could suddenly get worse and demanded an urgent appraisal of drug-resistance levels in Africa.
Spread by bites from infected mosquitoes, malaria is a major killer of the under-fives with one child dying from the disease every two minutes.
Between 1,500 and 2,000 people are treated for malaria in the UK each year – always after foreign travel. Most are treated with the combination drug: artemether-lumefantrine.
But clinical reports showed the therapy failed in four patients between October 2015 and February 2016.All initially responded to therapy and were sent home, but were readmitted around a month later when the infection rebounded.All of the patients were eventually treated using other therapies.
Samples of the parasite that causes malaria were analyzed at the Malaria Reference Laboratory at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.But the detailed analysis of the parasites suggested they were developing ways of resisting the effects of the front-line drugs.
Two of the cases were associated with travel to Uganda, one with Angola and one with Liberia – suggesting drug-resistant malaria could be emerging over wide regions of the continent.
The malaria parasites all seemed to be evolving different mechanisms rather than there being one new type of resistant malaria parasite spreading through the continent. The type of resistance is also clearly distinct from the form developing in South East Asia that has been causing huge international concern.
Prof. Dame Sally Davies, the chief medical officer for England, said this is a stark warning for the future of global medicine.
“We are in dire need of new drugs to keep pace with resistance, in low and middle-income countries in particular, the consequences of ineffective drugs are catastrophic,” Davies said.
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