A NEW combination of antimalarial drugs, tested in Tanzania, has proven remarkably successful against resistant strains of the disease, according to a study reported in Saturday’s issue of The Lancet. The combination is a mixture of two existing drugs, chlorproguanil and dapsone, the British medical weekly said. A team led by Theonest Mutabingwa from the National Institute for Medical Research at Amani-Tanga, Tanzania, tried it on children aged under five who had falciparum malaria, the severest form of the disease. The group of 360 children were first given a standard treatment, pyrimethamine-sulfadoxine, and if this did not work, they were either given a second dose of that treatment or the chlorproguanil-dapsone combination. Repeat treatment with pyrimethamine-sulfadoxine wiped out the malaria parasite in only 39% of children, but the success rate was 93% among those who were given chlorproguanil-dapsone. Mutabingwa’s team said the combination “could become a usable second-line drug” to pyrimethamine-sulfadoxine, which in itself is a replacement for chloroquine. “Drug development to international regulatory standards takes time, but Africa is in desperate need of an effective and affordable alternative to pyrimethamine-sulfadoxine,” it adds. Chloroquine-resistant falciparum malaria is already rife in Botswana, Kenya, Malawi, South Africa and Tanzania. Malaria, spread by mosquito bites, infects some 300-million to 500-million people and causes 1,5-million to three million deaths every year. – AFP
Friday October 12, 2001
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