New drug boosts world fight against malaria

timmy

New drug boosts world fight against malaria

A new drug developed in India and based on a herb discovered in China could prove to be the biggest breakthrough in malaria treatment for a generation, scientists say today.

Malaria kills a child every 30 seconds in Africa. Worldwide, it kills more than a million people every year and 40% of the planet is always at risk. Malarial parasites have steadily become resistant to older treatments.

But researchers from the US, Switzerland, Australia and Britain report in Nature today on a synthetic drug that mimics a Chinese treatment called artemisinin, itself based on the herb sweet wormwood or Artemisia annua. Because the new drug is entirely factory made it could be cheaper, more consistent and produced more swiftly than any herbal extracts.

(more) http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/st...286105,00.html

Jorge Reverter

On July 10th I've sent a post reply to a post open 5th July by Deteljica "malaria" about the already manufactured product "Riamet" by multinational Novartis based on artemisina. You can have a look:
http://www.netdoctor.co.uk/medicine/...ns.asp?id=4714

Plenty of other webs just asking any searcher the word Riamet.

Jorge

edwardseco

Nice article in the Wall Street Journal a number of months ago. Very promising but the disease will evolve..

timmy

Jorge, thanks for pointing that out. I hadn't seen the earlier report.

Your link doesn't work, but there's information at http://www.netdoctor.co.uk/medicines/100004714.html

Wanderer22

Seem to recall that the drink "Absinthe" was made from wormwood... Did Toulouse-Lautrec ever catch malaria? The beverage is now banned in most countries.

W22

AvidTrekker

can be found from post no 27 by cyberhippie of this thread.

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Jorge Reverter

You can have a look:
http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/5...6,00430005.htm

It seems that the main difference is to reduce the high cost of the process making a synthetic drug. The only thing I can't understand is that I've read about the very, very cheap price Riamet from Novartis was distributed in African countries.
Probably the question is: Why multinationals are not very much interested in new, effective and cheap anti malaria drugs?. Probably because the millions deads and infected are not from the first world and in third world countries there is not ennough money to be paid for the treatments.

IVAN

Just putting a marker on this topic.

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