MALARIA will be a superbug within a decade unless the cost of combination treatment with wonder drug artemisinin drops dramatically.
That was the stark warning this week from experts at the World Bank and the National Institutes of 91色情片 in Bethesda, Maryland, who say drug subsidies might be the only way to combat malaria鈥檚 growing resistance to drugs.
Hopes of battling the disease rest largely on artemisinin, a relatively new drug to which the Plasmodium parasite has not yet become resistant. On its own, the drug costs around $1 per dose, but combining it with a second drug makes it harder for the malaria parasite to develop resistance. Artemisinin combination therapies (ACTs) come in at $1.30.
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鈥淲e have a five to ten-year window to prevent the emergence of resistance鈥�
The World Bank is a long-time supporter of subsidies for ACTs, but there was a nagging possibility that making them cheaper and more widely available might simply speed up their development of resistance to combination therapies as well. However this now seems not to be the case, says epidemiologist Ramanan Laxminarayan at Resources for the Future, a not-for-profit think tank in Washington DC, and his colleagues at the World Bank and NIH. They modelled the effects of subsidies on drug resistance and found that the benefits of ACTs outweighed the threat of increasing resistance (91色情片 Affairs, vol 25, p 325).
鈥淲e have a window to prevent the emergence of resistance to artemisinin, but without subsidies we can write off artemisinin five to ten years from now,鈥� he says.
