Phnom Penh (dpa) - The World Health Organization on Thursday
announced a 400-million-dollar program to combat a resistant strain
of malaria that has emerged in Southeast Asia in recent years.
The program, which has already received around one-third of the
funding it requires, will seek to prevent the spread of a falciparum
parasite that has become resistant to artemisinin-based combination
therapy (ACT), the global standard treatment for the disease.
Robert Newman, the director of the WHO's global malaria program,
said resistance had been found in areas of Cambodia, Thailand,
Myanmar and Vietnam, which would form the core focus for operations.
Laos and part of southern China are also included as they are
perceived to be "at risk."
The program, known as the Emergency Response to Artemisinin
Resistance (ERAR), will scale up some of the work done in recent
years during an ongoing and to date successful containment of an
earlier outbreak of ACT-resistant malaria on the Thai-Cambodian
border.
Hundreds of thousands of insecticide-treated bed nets were handed
out, for example, and key people in every village in that part of
Cambodia were trained to test for malaria and provide free drugs to
treat it. The authorities also cracked down on fake medicines.
"The emergency response is built on all of those experiences,"
said Newman. "The plan now is to say that we've had these small
experiences, but now we need to take them to scale in all the areas
that are affected if we want to be successful."
The WHO has warned that the emergence of resistance to artemisinin
"poses a serious global health threat" should it escape the region,
and said gains made in recent years could be lost.
The Australian government's development arm AusAID is one of the
donors to ERAR, along with the Global Fund and the Bill & Melinda
Gates Foundation.
Ben David, AusAID's principal health advisor, said that because
artemisinin resistance was a regional issue, solving that problem
would require governments to work together particularly on issues
such as reaching migrant communities.
"We need to tackle regional surveillance and strengthen that,"
David said. "And we need to improve drug quality - again that's a
regional issue. So we want to see strong coordination and better
coordination."
WHO said malaria killed 660,000 people worldwide last year. Most
were children living in Africa, and most died from a strain of
malaria that is resistant to chloroquine, which was for decades the
standard treatment. The chloroquine-resistant strain emerged in
western Cambodia in the 1950s.
Copyright 2013 dpa Deutsche Presse-Agentur GmbH