Thierry Diagana

A NEW TREATMENT FOR MALARIA

- VERONIQUE GREENWOOD

MALARIA DEATHS WERE DECLINING NOT THAT LONG AGO. Now, they have ticked back up. The disease, spread by mosquitoes, currently kills more than 600,000 people annually, most of them children under 5 in Africa. While swift treatment, insecticide-treated bed nets, and other interventions have been effective in bringing new infections down, the emergence of drug-resistant strains is imperiling those advances. Resistance is caused by a number of factors, including when patients don’t complete a course of treatment, which allows some malaria parasites to escape. Those with mutations enabling them to brush off treatment then explode in numbers.