Prensa. voanews.com
Som Aun
contracted malaria after moving to the Thma Baing district of Cambodia's Koh
Kong province in 2002. Four years later, two of his children contracted the
disease. For five years, his son, An,
now 19, and daughter, Sreyna, now 12, remained infected because no effective
treatment was available, he told VOA Khmer. "Sometimes the disease is
healed for one month, but it would come back in the next two months," he
said, adding they both exhibited high fevers and chills.
His children,
who work in banana plantations, were in and out of clinics, and "after
they took medicines, they would be fine for a period of time, then they would
have to go to the hospital if they were in serious condition," Aun said.
The family resorted to hospitals infrequently, because transportation cost
200,000 riel to 300,000 riel (or about $50 to $75).
Researchers are
increasingly alarmed by the emergence of a strain of drug-resistant malaria in
Cambodia, a so-called "superbug" that stares down the most commonly
used anti-malaria drugs.
The superbug,
first identified in 2008 in Cambodia, has spread into parts of Vietnam,
Thailand and Laos. Last month, scientists from the Mahidol Oxford Tropical
Medicine Research Unit (MORU) published a letter in The Lancet saying the
superbug's spread throughout the Mekong area was a serious threat to malaria control
and eradication.
"A single
mutant strain of very drug resistant malaria has now spread from western
Cambodia to north-eastern Thailand, southern Laos and into southern Vietnam and
caused a large increase in treatment failure of patients with malaria,"
says letter co-author Arjen Dondorp, and Oxford professor, in a MORU release.
MORU is a collaborative effort involving Thailand's Mahidol University, Oxford
University and the U.K.-based Wellcome Trust.
"We are
losing a dangerous race," Nicholas White, one of the letter's co-authors,
said in the release. "The spread of this malaria 'superbug' has caused an
alarming rise in treatment failures forcing changes in drug policy and leaving
few options for the future."
Local officials
not concerned
Huy Rekol,
director of Cambodia's National Center for Parasitology, Entomology and Malaria
Control (CNM), said he was not worried by the drug-resistant malaria.
"In our
country, we don't need to worry about matters of death or resistance because we
have efficient drugs to use every day," he said.
Malaria in
Cambodia is caused by two types of viruses transmitted by female mosquitoes,
according to the CNM. It identified several factors leading to a rise in
malaria infections in 2015, including increasing mobility of people living in
malaria-affected areas.
Rekol said that
about 10,000 infections were detected in 2017, but all those identified as
contracting malaria were treated. He said that any resistance was
"manageable," adding that more should be done to prevent transmission
in the first place. Nguyen Thi Khe, a former official at the government Institute
of Public Hygiene, told VOA Vietnamese that malaria was "not a serious
issue in Vietnam right now," a sentiment that was repeated by other
officials.
Dondorp said it
was worrying that Cambodian malaria officials appeared to be unconcerned by the
reports of drug resistance, which he said could undo the gains of recent years.
"In northeastern Thailand, Srisaket province is affected, almost all of
Cambodia is affected, as well as southern Laos, and South Vietnam,"
Dondorp said in an email to VOA. In an
email, he said, "The evolution and subsequent transnational spread of this
single fit multidrug-resistant malaria parasite lineage is of international
concern."
A risk to
Africa?
Globally, an
estimated 3.2 billion people in 95 countries and territories are at risk of
being infected with malaria, according to the World Health Organization. Most
of the deaths occur in Africa, and there, children age 5 and younger account
for more than two-thirds of the deaths, according to WHO.
Dr. David
Sullivan, an infectious disease expert at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of
Public Health who is affiliated with its Malaria Research Institute, said
health officials in Africa have been monitoring the situation for several years
and that the new bug has yet to appear there.
But, Sullivan
added, "in the age of global travel" he could not say there is
"zero possibility" of it making the jump. However, "even if it does
jump, it's not that super of a bug that it's going to leave us defenseless, as
if we have no drugs at all for malaria."
An analysis
conducted at the request of the Malaria Policy Advisory Committee (MPAC), WHO's
top advisory committee for malaria, found that while "the risk of
drug-resistant malaria spreading to India and Africa cannot be discounted, the
broad consensus was that drug-resistant parasites were more likely to emerge
independently in other parts of the world than to spread directly from" the
Mekong region consisting of Cambodia, Lao People's Democratic Republic (PDR),
Myanmar, Thailand and Viet Nam, according to Dr. Pedro Alonso, director of the
Global Malaria Programme, in a Q&A published late last month on the
committee's site.
Alonso said that
WHO experts do not "at this time" consider "the threat of
antimalarial drug resistance a public health emergency of international
concern."
That
drug-resistant malaria would emerge in Cambodia is not a surprise. "In the
past 50 or 60 years, this is the fifth or sixth time this has happened,"
Sullivan said. "This is not new.". The new strain "is able to be
tackled and held in check," he said. "I understand the concern and
the alarm, but I would not put a superbug label on it, although I can see why people
have."
"Treatment
options for the new strain exist," Sullivan said, by either adding a drug
to those usually prescribed, or extending the treatment duration of the current
treatment.
Substandard
drugs
Cambodia adopted
one treatment, to which resistance has apparently grown, but has since switched
to another. The resistance was identified in the western Cambodian region of
Pailin, later spreading to northeastern Thailand and southern Laos, according
to the letter published by The Lancet.
Dondorp, deputy
director of MORU, said in an email to VOA that resistance may have been
encouraged by the use of substandard drugs to treat malaria. "Malaria is a
disease of the poor and disenfranchised. These are often populations living in
border areas and in or near to the forest," he said. Linh Dan of VOA
Vietnamese contributed to this report which originated on VOA Khmer.