MALARIA

 

ACCORDING TO THE WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION

• Globally in 2023, there were an estimated 263 million malaria cases and 597 000 malaria deaths in 83 countries.
• The WHO African Region carries a disproportionately high share of the global malaria burden.
• In 2023, the WHO African Region was home to 94% of malaria cases (246 million) and 95% (569 000) of malaria deaths.
• Children under 5 accounted for about 76% of all malaria deaths in the Region.

Malaria is a mosquito-borne infectious disease   people who are bitten by infected mosquitoes often develop a “fever, fatigue, vomiting, and headaches, and in severe cases, it can cause jaundice, seizures, coma, or death.^[1][9] Symptoms usually begin 10 to 15 days after being bitten

 The current therapy is Artemisinin.  It’s discovery led to a Nobel Prize in 2015. The World Health Organization began to recommend ACTs as the front-line treatment for malaria n 2001 in countries facing resistance to older drugs, and globally in 2006.

The woman who developed artemisinin, Tu You you was born in 1930 in the city of Ningbo on the east coast of China. Her family stressed education for her and her four brothers, but she had to take a two-year break from studying at 16 because she had contracted tuberculosis. When she returned to school, she knew exactly what she wanted to study: medicine. She wanted to find cures for diseases like the one that had afflicted her.

At Beijing Medical College, Tu studied pharmacology, learning how to classify medicinal plants, extract active ingredients and determine their chemical structures. When she graduated in 1955 at the age of 24 the cultural revolution was in full swing and all senior researchers were being “re-educated.” Tu, a relatively newcomer was assigned to work at the newly established Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine, where she would stay for her entire career. From 1959 to 1962, she took a full-time course in traditional Chinese medicine for researchers trained in modern Western methods.

North Vietnam asked China for help with battling malaria, which was causing tremendous casualties among its soldiers in the Vietnam War. The single-celled parasite that causes malaria had become resistant to chloroquine, the standard malaria treatment. Chairman Mao Zedong launched Project 523 on 23 May 1967 to find a cure for chloroquine-resistant malaria.

In 1969, when she was 39 years old, Tu was appointed head of Project 523. Her first order of business was researching the effects of malaria in situ. And for that, she traveled to Hainan Island in southern China, which was currently experiencing a malaria outbreak of its own.

She had to leave her one-year-old daughter with her parents and put her four-year-old in a nursery. “The work was the top priority so I was certainly willing to sacrifice my personal life,” Tu later said. It would be three years before she saw her children again.

Upon their return to Beijing, the team reviewed ancient medical texts to understand traditional Chinese ways of fighting malaria. At that point over 240,000 compounds had already been tested for use in potential antimalarial drugs, and none had worked. Finally, the team found a reference to sweet wormwood, which had been used in China around 400 AD to treat “intermittent fevers,” a symptom of malaria.

In 1971, Tu’s team isolated one active compound in wormwood that seemed to battle malaria-friendly parasites. They tested extracts of the compound but nothing worked. So Tu returned once more to the ancient text. She wondered whether the active ingredient in wormwood was being damaged when they boiled the wormwood to prepare the solvent, and so she tried another preparation, this time with an ether-based solvent. Since it boils at a lower temperature, the wormwood wasn’t damaged; when she tested it on mice and monkeys, it had a 100 percent success rate.

Tu and two colleagues tested the substance on themselves before testing them on 21 patients in the Hainan Province. All of them recovered. 

Dozens of years later a new drug,  ganaplacide, was developed by researchers at Novartis after screening more than 2 million compounds for antimalaria activity in the lab. Ganaplacide kills malaria parasites very effectively.  Novartis, the company developing the drug developed a combination of ganaplacide with lumefantrine, an older antimalarial that is also the partner drug in the world’s most widely used ACT, known by the brand name Coartem, a drug that combines artemether—a drug derived from artemisinin WITH lumefantrine.

"In a study enrolled more than 1600 malaria patients across 12 African countries were treated for 3 days with either the new combination or Coartem. On 12 November, researchers reported at the annual meeting of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene here that 99.2% of those treated with the new combination were cured, compared with 96.7% of patients who received the artemisinin combination.

Africa bears the heaviest burden from malaria, with an estimated 246 million cases and 569,000 deaths, most of them children, in 2023.

The drug was also faster than Coartem at killing gametocytes, the sexual stages of the parasite that mosquitoes pick up from human blood when they bite, so it is better at reducing transmission.  Almost 20% of patients who received the new drug vomited, compared with less than 5% in the Coartem group. And more than 10 times as many patients broke off their treatment with the new drug."

References;  wiki, nobel prize website, and science magazine November 2025