Recent News and Articles on the Keywords: malaria treatment + malaria + treatment  Related to the article below (Last Update: 8/7/2008)

Malaria treatment close WA Business News (subscription), Australia - Aug 5, 2008 Perth-based Eastland Medical Systems Ltd is a step closer to bringing its revolutionary anti-malaria treatment to market, with African field trials to ... Fighting malaria still remains tough in Tanzania IPPmedia, United Republic of Tanzania - Aug 5, 2008 Tanzania plans to introduce a highly effective combination treatment for malaria. Such combination treatments work quickly to prevent the disease from ... Voice of America Bill Clinton Announces AIDS, Malaria Initiatives National Geographic, DC - Aug 4, 2008 Hundreds of thousands of deaths caused by AIDS and malaria will be averted with better treatment programs, former US President Bill Clinton said yesterday ... AlJazeeraEnglish Bill Clinton praises France in fight against AIDS AFP Former President Clinton Calls for Improving Overall Health ... Voice of America American Chronicle - AFP all 434 news articles » Combined Malaria and NTD Control Effort Is Cost-Effective Solution ... PR Web (press release), WA - "The Network's effective system of delivering treatment through trained local community coordinators is an ideal way to enhance malaria control and NTD ... AFGHANISTAN: Far fewer people seeking malaria treatment - Health ... IRINnews.org, NY - Aug 4, 2008 KABUL, 4 August 2008 (IRIN) - The number of people seeking malaria treatment in Afghanistan has declined significantly over the past six months, ... WELT ONLINE New information on AIDS helps countries develop prevention strategies MediaGlobal, NY - ... include tuberculosis and malaria.? While the report was able to point out important areas where individuals are still unable to receive proper treatment ... The President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief New England Journal of Medicine (subscription) New hope For Aids Fight in Africa African Path Comment by Julie Davids Executive Director, CHAMP Washington Times - Sydney Morning Herald all 1,459 news articles » AFP A Tug-of-War, A Funeral, and Drug Prices Palm Beach Post,  United States - She was new to activism then, her involvement sparked after a two-week trip at 17 to Africa where she caught Malaria. A five-dollar treatment cured her, ... New UN scheme seeks to boost response of national health systems ... UN News Centre WHO and World Bank unite for better results from global health ... Joy Online War on AIDS will be long, more funds needed: UN AFP all 38 news articles » Citizen Caribbean and Latin America Ask for Three Times More Funds from ... Caribbean PressReleases.com (press release), Barbados - ... significantly to expand AIDS treatment and prevention, mass-distribution campaigns for mosquito nets to fight malaria and TB treatment and diagnosis. ... Former Soviet states at AIDS tipping point: experts AFP HEALTH: Not Enough AIDS Funds and Not Always Well Spent Inter Press Service (subscription) all 17 news articles » Ontario Now Fact Sheet: A Historic and Lifesaving Commitment to Fight HIV/AIDS MarketWatch - Jul 30, 2008 In 2007 alone, the President's Malaria Initiative reached an estimated 25 million people in Africa with lifesaving malaria prevention or treatment ... Africa: Efforts to Fight HIV/Aids Combine Treatment, Prevention, Care AllAfrica.com Congress Approves $50 Billion for AIDS Treatment, Prevention Bloomberg Comment by Dr. Paul Zeitz Executive Director, Global AIDS Alliance AFP - MaximsNews Network all 1,194 news articles » Global Fund prepares new to plan to subsidise malaria treatment cost TropIKA, Switzerland - Jul 31, 2008 ... therapies (ACTs), the most effective anti-malarial treatment available currently, to ensure more people can afford drugs that will cure them of malaria. ...

Malaria: older drugs may be good treatment in some parts of Africa

A combination of older malaria drugs could treat malaria efficiently in some parts of Africa until a newer antimalarial drug called is widely available in those areas, a review of recent studies suggests.

After 28 days of treatment, there were fewer cases of malaria among children taking a combination of the older Sulfadoxine-Pyrimethamine ( sold under the brand name Fansidar ) and Amodiaquine than among patients taking a combination of Fansidar and Artesunate, a drug based on the newer antimalarial called Artemisinin.

However, the Fansidar-Artesunate combination was more effective than the other drug combination at clearing malaria parasites from the blood at a particularly infectious stage of parasite development, according to Hasifa Bukirwa of the Uganda Malaria Surveillance Project and Julia Critchley of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine in England.

Bukirwa and Critchley say Fansidar-Amodiaquine may be a useful stopgap treatment in areas without access to Artemisinin drugs and areas where malaria resistance to Fansidar and Amodiaquine is still low.

The review is published in The Cochrane Library, a publication of The Cochrane Collaboration.

Artemisinin antimalarials are fast-acting and effective drugs that have proved useful against multi-drug resistant strains of the falciparum type of malaria.
The World Health Organization recommends combination therapy that includes Artemisinin drugs as the standard treatment in countries where malaria is resistant to older individual drugs such as Chloroquine and Amodiaquine.

However, " Artemisinin drugs are not yet widely available in Africa and may not be for some time because of low production, comparatively high cost, dosing complexity and the lack of clinical experience with Artemisinin-based combinations," Bukirwa and Critchley say.

The Cochrane reviewers analyzed four studies including 775 malaria patients, children age six months to five years. The studies compared the Fansidar-Amodiaquine treatment to Fansidar-Artesunate therapy for mild to moderate cases of falciparum malaria.

In three of the studies, the Fansidar-Amodiaquine treatment reduced by nearly 40 percent the risk of still having malaria after 28 days of treatment, compared to Fansidar-Artesunate treatment.

But the Fansidar-Artesunate combination was more than twice as likely as the other drug combination to reduce the number of infectious malaria parasites in the blood to clinically insignificant levels. Reducing the parasite load is important because it reduces the spread of the disease, the reviewers say.

Bukirwa and Critchley stress that the Fansidar-Amodiaquine combination should be considered useful and safe only in areas where resistance to both drugs is low. They warn that resistance may have increased since the studies in the review, conducted between 2002 and 2005, were completed.

" It is possible that Sulfadoxine-Pyrimethamine may not be recommended at all for first-line treatment of any malaria in Africa in the future," Bukirwa said.

Although combination malaria therapies are also being tried in Southeast Asia, where malaria is a major public health problem, the Fansidar-Amodiaquine combination is probably not a viable treatment option for that region, says David Bell, a malaria expert at the University of Liverpool in England.

The failure rates for both Amodiaquine and Fansidar "on their own tend to be considerable higher there than when they are used in Africa as monotherapies," he explains. " As such, I don't think the combination of Amodiaquine and Sulfadoxine-Pyrimethamine would even be considered in that setting."

Malaria affects 300 to 500 million people worldwide every year and is the leading cause of illness and death in sub-Saharan Africa, according to a 2000 WHO report.

Source: Center for the Advancement of Health, 2006