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Drug resistance for treatment of malaria that appeared in Cambodia with a strain of malaria soon spread to other countries in Southeast Asia, according to the authors of a report. new study that may have implications for the African continent.
Researchers at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, Oxford University and Mahidol University in Thailand found that later generations of a strain of multidrug-resistant malaria were replacing local parasite populations in Vietnam, Laos and northern Laos. Thailand – and continued to acquire new genetic changes.
The researchers found that this strain, called KEL1 / PLA1, was widespread in Cambodia in six years. What they learned by studying the DNA of parasites taken from blood samples of malaria patients over a 10-year period ending in 2018 is that the situation deteriorated a lot after 2013. They published the results of their work in The Lancet Infectious Diseases this week. .
"Our study provides a clear picture of the spread of malaria resistant to first-line treatment and demonstrates the importance of using genetics to detect resistance patterns in each region," said Dr. Dominic Kwiatkowski, lead author of the study, Wellcome Sanger Institute and the Big Data Institute in Oxford. "Active genomic surveillance is now essential to inform national malaria control programs, to reduce the risk of a major epidemic."
According to the World Health Organization, about 435,000 people died of malaria in 2017 and 93% of them were in sub-Saharan Africa. Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique, Uganda and India accounted for almost half of all cases worldwide.
A WHO report in 2017 found that the fight against malaria was already compromised by resistance to insecticides used to control the mosquitoes that spread the disease, particularly in Africa and in the eastern Mediterranean regions.
Image: Sanger Institute
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