Malaria Medication

New medicine improves the treatment of malaria

Doctors without Borders (MSF) welcome the launch of a new type of malaria medicine.

The medicine ASMQ combines artesunat and meflochin (MQ) in one overall dosage, which is designed to work against the most dangerous type of malaria.

The new medicine particularly is suitable for use in Asia and Latin America.

Here is a woman from Combodia being tested for Malaria. 

The medicine, which is developed through a partnership between the research initiative DNDi (drug for Neglected Disease’s initiatives) and Farmanguinhos, a laboratory under the Brazilian Ministry of Health, is an important tool to improve the treatment of a disease, which globally kills over one million human beings a year and kills a child every 30. second.

In 2006 Doctors without borders treated 1,8 million human beings from malaria on projects in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Improves treatment
By combining two medicines in one pill Asmq improves the malaria treatment of both children and the adults considerably.

Advantages at the new combination medicine are that you has to store and to hand out fewer pills, they are cheap to buy, and that the treatment can be limited till three days.

In addition the pill stays well in hot climates, without it being necessary store it on cool, and existing several dosages, which are adapted to children.

Malaria is transmitted through mosquitoes, which are infected with one of four types of the parasite Plasmodium.

Every year is registered one million cases of malaria in Latin America.

25 percent of them contagious Latin-Americans have the most dangerous type of malaria, P. Falciparum.

In Asia there are every year registered three million cases of malaria.

The new medicine is approved in Brazil and the expectation are that it’s to be distributed in both Latin America and Asia. 

The initiative DNDi Drugs for Neglected Disease’s (DNDi) was founded in 2003 by Doctors without Borders, Pasteur and four other public research institutions.

The initiative focuses on research in and development of news and more effective treatment forms to overlooked diseases such as malaria, Chaga’s, Kala Azar and sleeping sickness.

It’s important now days that the new malaria medicine Asmq is developed in the public sector and won’t be patented.

Therefore the preparation can at once be released like an inexpensive, generic medicine.

Poor countries need the non-profit development of medicine and vaccines, which are directed towards the inhabitants at the developing countries, are it is an important step towards new principles for research in and development of new medicine.

Today research and development in medicines are mainly based on a patent system, which press the price up, and make it difficult for developing countries to get access to the medicine.

In ten days (WHO) is a host for a meeting, where a number of governments has to discuss possible methods to incite the additional development of medicine, which corresponds to the developing countries’ needs, and that are price-wise within poor countries’ reach.

Posted in Drug Information And Products