Jan 24 2011
NBC News' "World Blog" reports on the emergence of drug-resistant malaria along the border between Thailand and Cambodia. "The Pailin area [in Cambodia] is now the epicenter of a fight to contain a growing resistance to Artemisinin, which is the world's main anti-malarial drug," the blog writes before noting the global health community's efforts to contain the spread of drug-resistant malaria.
"But why this border? Why has resistance always started here?" the blog asks. "Experts speculate that conflict, poverty and a lot of migrants moving across the border have all played a part. Resistance also spreads when people don't take drugs properly, and counterfeit and sub-standard drugs are also to blame. They have been rife in the border areas," according to the blog.
The following experts are quoted in the piece: Najibullah Habib, head of the WHO's effort to prevent the spread of drug-resistant malaria; Christopher Raymond, an expert in counterfeit drugs, whose project is backed by U.S. Pharmacopeia and USAID; and David Saunders and Stuart Tyner of the Armed Forces Research Institute of Medical Sciences. The blog post includes two video clips (Williams, 1/22).
 This article was reprinted from kaiserhealthnews.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.
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