Drug-resistant malaria is spreading rapidly across south-east Asia, researchers warn today.
The multi-drug resistant malaria strain has emerged in Cambodia and is now replacing local parasite populations in Vietnam, Laos and north-eastern Thailand, according to research published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases.
The new strain has been named KEL1/PLA1 and is resistant to DHA-PPQ treatment.
The latest findings come from genetic analysis of 1,673 parasites found in the blood of malaria patients over the last ten years.
This showed that prevalence of the new strain was greater than 50% in most regions except Laos.
Researcher Dr Roberto Amato, from the Wellcome Sanger Institute, Cambridge, UK, said: "We discovered that the multi-drug resistant KEL1/PLA1 malaria strain had spread aggressively, replacing local malaria parasites, and had become the dominant strain in Vietnam, Laos and northeastern Thailand.
"Our large-scale genomic approach demonstrates how surveillance can provide crucial information to malaria control programmes, supporting them in evaluating available treatment options."
Fellow researcher Professor Olivo Miotto, who is attached to the Wellcome Sanger Institute, Big Data Institute at University of Oxford and Mahidol University, Bangkok, said: "The speed at which these resistant malaria parasites have spread in Southeast Asia is very worrying.
"Other drugs may be effective at the moment but the situation is extremely fragile and this study highlights that urgent action is needed to eliminate the parasites from the Greater Mekong Subregion, to prevent them spreading and evolving further."
William Hamilton and Roberto Amato et al. Evolution and expansion of multidrug resistant malaria in Southeast Asia: a genomic epidemiology study. The Lancet Infectious Diseases 23 July 2019; doi: 10.1016/ S1473-3099(19)30392-5
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