Artemisinin Combination Therapies (ACT)

Antimalarial chemotherapy has been the primary option in the fight against malaria. However, the burden of this disease is still very heavy partly due to the development of multi-drug resistant Plasmodium falciparum strains . The malaria community presently considers mono-therapy as an inappropriate approach for malaria treatment.

The new antimalarial efforts and strategies are being deployed to combat the new face of malaria. One of these strategies is the use of artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACTs) which have proven to be very effective against malaria in Africa, and some African countries plagued with resistant forms of P.falciparum have started instituting the ACTs as first line malaria treatment. Artesunate plus amodiaquine combination is one ACT recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO) for use in malaria control programmes and a first line treatment for African children with uncomplicated malaria. It has become a national policy in some African countries and was launched in some parts of India also. It was launched in areas which show resistance in Plasmodium falciparum to Chloroquine.

Artemisinin was recently in news because Malaria that is resistant to Artemisinin, has now emerged along the Thailand-Myanmar border — 800km westward from where it was first confirmed in Cambodia in 2006. Artemisinin Combination Therapies (ACT) kills malaria parasite in a human bloodstream within 24 to 36 hours. With the drug-resistant strain, ACT needs up to 120 hours to kill the parasite. Since artemisinin-resistant malaria was confirmed in Cambodia, there has been a concerted international effort to control P. falciparum malaria to prevent resistance spreading.