Parasites resistant to new anti-malarial medication Artemisinin seems to be spreading beyond the western Cambodia area where it was first detected. This was announced by a US health official recently. The World Health Organisation (WHO) had warned early last year that parasites resistant to Artemisinin had emerged along the border between Cambodia and Thailand.

It may be noted that Artemisinin-based medication has been largely credited in recent years with increasing recovery rates from the mosquito-transmitted disease that kills nearly 1 million people a year worldwide. Timothy Ziemer, the US government’s global co-ordinator against malaria, said that there were indications of Artemisinin resistance in other parts of the region. According to him, signs of resistance to Artemisinin had been found in southern Myanmar and possibly on the Chinese-Myanmar border and in southern Vietnam near Cambodia.

Last year, WHO warned that the emergence of the resistance could seriously undermine efforts to bring malaria under control. Artemisinin-based medication was regarded as a replacement for older drugs that were fast becoming useless in several areas of the world as the malaria parasite developed resistance to them. Ziemer said that it was important for national governments to remain focused to contain and eventually eliminate these multi-drug resistant strains. One way to do that, according to him, was to eliminate fake and substandard medicines, which increase resistance.