Nicholas White

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A malaria clinic near the Thai-Burma border. Artemisinin has been Thailand's most potent weapon in the long-running battle against malaria, contributing to a sharp drop in deaths. Photograph: Pornchai Kittiwongsakul/AFP/Getty Images

An African mother returns in the evening from the fields where she has been working to find her young daughter has died: the fever started only the day before, and in the morning her child seemed to be coping. Sadly this is a common tragedy. Every day malaria, a parasite of the red blood cells transmitted by mosquitoes, kills more than 2,000 people. Most of these preventable deaths are in young African children.

Our two main weapons to fight malaria are insecticides to kill the mosquitoes and drugs to kill the parasites. We are losing both to resistance. In the past few years we seemed to be winning – malaria suffering and death have fallen, largely because of amazing drugs derived from Chinese traditional medicine called qinghaosu, or artemisinin.…  Seguir leyendo »