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Health

The Race Against Cambodia’s 'Mutant Malaria' Is Being Lost, Scientists Warn

Now they are scrambling to stop the superbug from spreading to Africa.
A female Aedes aegypti mosquito is shown in this 2006 Center for Disease Control (CDC) photograph released to Reuters on October 30, 2013. REUTERS/James Gathany/CDC/Handout via Reuters/File Photo

A new, drug-resistant form of mutant malaria is spreading through South East Asia. Now, scientists are warning the superbug needs to be "urgently" stopped before it reaches Africa's shores, where it could unleash a wave of sickness and death of staggering proportions.

"We are losing a dangerous race," said Professor Nicholas White of Oxford University. "We need to tackle this public health emergency urgently."

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White and his colleagues published a letter in the The Lancet Infectious Diseases on Wednesday warning that, "in a recent sinister development," a single dominant mutant strain of malaria has arisen in western Cambodia, where it has "outcompeted the other resistant malaria parasites."

The mutant malaria is resistant to drugs based on artemisinin, the disease's main front-line treatment, and has already spread from western Cambodia to north-eastern Thailand, southern Laos and southern Vietnam.

In some parts of Cambodia, resistance rates have reached 60 percent, and treatment is failing about a third of the time in Vietnam, co-author professor Arjen Dondorp of the University of Oxford said.

While the mutant strain is worrisome, it's still pretty far away from the place where 90 percent of the world's 212 million annual malaria infections occur — Africa.

What concerns health experts now is what would happen if that the dangerous mutant disease spreads to the place where it would do the most damage.

"You don't want to be crying wolf, or saying it's definitely about to go ballistic," Rob Mather of the Against Malaria Foundation, which provides mosquito nets to developing countries, told VICE News.

But if drug-resistant malaria becomes truly widespread throughout Africa, "the numbers of people who could die, and fall sick, could become very, very, very bad compared with where they are now."

The irony is that malaria, a disease carried by mosquitoes, has been in retreat in recent years.

In December 2015, the World Health Organization (WHO) said more than half the countries where malaria still occurs have reduced their cases by at least 75 percent since 2000. The overall number of malaria cases dropped by 40 percent while the death rate from malaria declined by 66 percent in the Africa in that time.

The mutant strain risks undoing those gains.

"If resistance moves beyond Asia and into Africa, much of the recent progress in reducing deaths from malaria will be reversed," said Philippe Guérin, Director of the WorldWide Antimalarial Resistance Network.