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Drug-resistant malaria found near Indian border

The spread of malaria parasites resistant to the drug artemisinin into India would pose a serious threat to the global control and eradication of malaria.

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India faces an imminent danger from drug-resistant malaria parasites detected near the Myanmar-India border, threatening to repeat history and rendering the frontline anti-malaria treatment useless while putting millions of lives at risk, scientists warned today. The spread of malaria parasites resistant to the drug artemisinin into India would pose a serious threat to the global control and eradication of malaria, researchers said. "If drug resistance spreads from Asia to the African sub-continent, or emerges in Africa independently as we've seen several times before, millions of lives will be at risk," they said.

The researchers examined whether parasite samples collected at 55 malaria treatment centres across Myanmar carried mutations in specific regions of the parasite's kelch gene (K13) - a known genetic marker of artemisinin drug resistance. The team confirmed resistant parasites in Homalin, Sagaing Region located only 25km from the Indian border. "Myanmar is considered the frontline in the battle against artemisinin resistance as it forms a gateway for resistance to spread to the rest of the world," said Dr Charles Woodrow from Mahidol-Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit and senior author of the study at Oxford University.

"With artemisinins we are in the unusual position of having molecular markers for resistance before resistance has spread globally. The more we understand about the current situation in the border regions, the better prepared we are to adapt and implement strategies to overcome the spread of further drug resistance," said Woodrow.

The team obtained the DNA sequences of 940 samples of malaria infections (known as Plasmodium falciparum malaria parasites) from across Myanmar and neighbouring border regions in Thailand and Bangladesh between 2013 and 2014. Of those 940 samples, 371 carried a resistance-conferring K13 mutation, researchers said. 

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