23 July 2019 Bangkok (Thailand) – A rapidly evolving multi-drug resistant lineage of P. falciparum malaria parasites continues to spread in Southeast Asia, leading to alarmingly high treatment failure rates in Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam for DHA-piperaquine, one of the world’s most important anti-malaria drugs, say University of Oxford researchers in a study published today in The Lancet Infectious Diseases.
Rapidly spreading multidrug-resistant parasites render frontline malaria drug ineffective in southeast Asia
24 July 2019
The findings of two studies, published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases journal, reveal that by 2016–2018 malaria parasites resistant to both artemisinin and its widely used partner drug piperaquine represented more than 80% of the parasites circulating in northeast Thailand and Vietnam, despite having only emerged in western Cambodia in 2008.