Malaria is an ancient killer and it’s one that keeps outwitting humanity at every turn. It took centuries for people to figure out it was spread by mosquitoes. It evolved resistance to the drugs used to treat it and we developed new ones. It’s made comebacks thanks to climate change in places that got rid of the disease before by cleaning out mosquitoes.
And now, the parasites that cause malaria have evolved resistance to the newest treatments – drugs based on artemisinin.
Worse, that resistance is spreading and has emerged in Africa, the continent with the most malaria cases.
COVID created a double whammy, not only killing people directly but also raising the death rate from malaria, as people got the symptoms mixed up or simply avoided going to clinics for treatment, says Karen Barnes, a professor of pharmacology and Founding Director of the Collaborating Centre for Optimising Antimalarial Therapy at the University of Cape Town in South Africa.
Professor Barnes has been working for 20 years to coordinate better treatments for malaria as Director of the Pharmacology Scientific Group for the World Wide Antimalarial Resistance Network (WWARN) and Co-chair of the South African Malaria Elimination Committee. She’s also the coordinator of an EU-funded consortium to help countries in eastern and southern Africa tackle malaria drug resistance called MARC SE-Africa (Mitigating Antimalarial Resistance Consortium for South-East Africa).
She says it’s vital to improve treatments by combining drugs more effectively to catch the parasite at various stages of its life cycle in the body. And, of course, new and better drugs are needed to fight malaria.
Listen as Professor Barnes explains the problem and possible solutions to One World, One Health host Maggie Fox.
You can hear more about malaria from One World, One Health here.