http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/12/28/world/AP-When-Drugs-Stop-Working-Malaria-Fights-Back.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&sq=malaria&st=cse&scp=2
The article is by "Martha Mendoza is an AP national writer based in Mexico City. Margie Mason is an AP medical writer who reported from Cambodia while on a fellowship from The Nieman Foundation at Harverd University." written Dec. 28th, 2009
This article focuses on the growing number of resistant strains of malaria and the causes of this sudden spike. The large jump in the number of people with the resistant strain can be blamed on the fake drugs being sold to "cure" malaria. These fake drugs only contain a small dose of Artemisinin, and are killing people all over the world. This article focuses on the spike in resistant strain malaria in Palin,Cambodia, today.
The effective drug that works to cure malaria is Artemisinin. If a person were to catch malaria and proceed to take a full dose of Artemisinin, they would be cured of the disease. Though when people in poor places like Palin, Cambodia go out to buy drugs they don't know what they are actually getting. Most times when they but the "drugs" they are really getting a fake drug that is just being called Artemisinin. If these drugs were simply no medicine it wouldn't be as bad as what most actually turn out to be. Most of the counterfeit drugs that are found actually contain small amounts of Artemisinin. With these small amounts of Artemisinin people can actually build up and immunity to the drug. When they take only a small amount of the useful drug Artemisinin, the malaria is not cleared from their system and is actually able to build up immunities to the drugs. Then if the person does eventually get to real drugs, it is often too late because the disease has already become resistant to the Artemisinin. The selling of counterfeit drugs is becoming a huge problem and poorer countries; because when people do not have the money to buy reliable drugs they often end up with fake drugs, which will ultimately lead to their death. The people have no way to protect themselves from catching the disease, and when they try to cure it often just end up even sicker. This is a highly recognized problem that is getting a lot of attention today. Many people debate over how to stop the distribution of these counterfeit drugs. Every time they find and take one shipment of them a new shippment simply arrives. This is a problem that is spreading as more and more people become infected with the resistant strain of malaria. I believe we need to find a solution to this problem before it spreads all over the world.
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I'm in complete agreement with Megan: counterfeit drugs are a problem that has to be solved. But the question remains: how can we prevent the spread of either the malaria or the drugs? One of the two is the solution, and making either one work is a massive undertaking. People have been cutting the good stuff with the mediocre or bad for thousands of years: watered-down beer, cocaine laced with rat poison, and now these drugs. It's a way to create more supply to meet the demand, and there are plenty of people who will be unethical about it just to get an edge. If law enforcement in those countries isn't going to prevent it now, odds are that they won't prevent it before things get significantly worse. And the article drives home a strong point about our inability to control the spread of malaria. The only way I can see of effectively getting rid of the disease is destroying the infected area and everything living in it, which is obviously not a viable option. Maybe the UN could block travel in and out of the infected countries. Despite the international incident it would create, it might well stop some of the worst drug resistant strains from crossing national borders.
ReplyDeleteSame with the rise in TB, misuse and improper medication has brought significant affects. It’s pretty astonishing that there are uncouth people that charge money in return for fake drugs. From my article about drug resistance with TB, I learned that a patient needs to complete his or her treatments in order to be cured; this means that all doses are crucial. If the “fake” drugs only contain small amounts of Artemisinin, rather than the required amounts, they will do nothing for the patient and the Malaria will not go away. These Cambodians are only loosing money because they are being exploited for their ignorance on the subject of the needed medication. I think this mistreatment of people is just as bad as the new, more drug-resistant, strains of Malaria that are spreading. Also, these subjects are inversely related. If these people don’t get the drugs they need to be cured, Malaria will begin to spread at an even higher rate. I agree with the things Megan said, especially that “we need to find a solution to this problem before it spreads all over the world.”
ReplyDeleteI am very surprised at the problem that this article explains about malaria in Cambodia. Before this article, I had never heard of anything like this going on in countries where malaria is still a big problem. I can't believe that this goes on in countries such as Cambodia, and I think that it's awful that people have to worry about taking fake medication on top of worrying about contracting malaria, which can be deadly. This article relates to what we learned about in class about how by taking small amounts of a drug or having small amounts of a certain toxin can cause your immune system to build up a resistance to that drug or toxin.
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