BY ABDUEL ELINAZA, 29 APRIL 2014 ALLAFRICA.COM
Guangzhou — TANZANIA could be headed to a malaria-free country, thanks to Chinese medical research findings that target the disease-causing parasite itself instead of the mosquitoes which carry it. The current approach to deal with malaria is to control mosquitoes, which spread the disease by either killing them with insecticides or by draining bodies of stagnant water in which their larvae live.
However, Dr Li Guoqiao of the Guangzhou University of Chinese Medicine has developed a drug therapy based on artemisinin which attacks the malaria parasite to eradicate the disease.
According to General Manager, Mr Pan Longhua of Artepharm Company which manufactures the drug, after successfully eradicating malaria in the Comoros, a similar project was designed to be extended to Tanzania and talks to that end had reached an encouraging stage.
"I was in Tanzania two months ago where I met with the minister for health. We exchanged ideas and the prospects are good," Mr Pan told the 'Daily News.' "We are still exchanging ideas and other stakeholders are very supportive. Once everything has been agreed the pilot project will take off later this year," he added.
The firm's delegation when in Tanzania, also held talks with the National Malaria Control Programme, according to the GM. "The talks and data collection will take some more time, but we are hopeful that a project similar to one we undertook in the Comoros will be introduced in Tanzania before this year ends," the general manager said.
He said since Tanzania had certified the medicine in 2009, there was no problem in implementing the project in the country. WHO, he said, was yet to certify the drug, claiming it needed more findings especially on its side-effects.
The firm's approach is dubbed "Fast Elimination of Malaria through Source Eradication or FEMSE."
Two drugs, artemisinin and a second antimalarial called piperaquine, are the major ingredients in the combination made and sold under the brand name Artequick by Artepharm, a firm based in Guangdong Province, which Dr Li helped found.
To deny the parasites in their human hosts enough time to exterminate them, the researchers administer three doses of Artequick, spaced a month apart. To add extra power, the first dose is accompanied by a third drug, primaquine.
The drug, after several clinical tests in South East Asian countries, the tests were extended to Moheli, one of the three islands comprising the Comoros in 2007.
The number of malaria cases there subsequently fell by 95 per cent, though reinfection from other islands caused a small rebound. In 2012 the same tests were carried out in Anjouan where the number of malaria cases fell by 97 per cent. In October 2013 the campaign moved to Grande Comore, the most populous island.
When the process comes to completion there nearly all of the 700,000 Comorans will have taken part in FEMSE. The World Health Organisation (WHO) is critical of the experiment's approach for not also focusing on the drug's side-effects in the Comoro archipelago.
Guangzhou University of Chinese Medicine's Dr Qiaobo Ye does not, however, believe the side-effects will be a problem because the dose use is so low.
"We have not noticed evidence of any side-effects so far," he said. Nevertheless, the drug may cause nausea, fever, stomach and back pain, headaches and chills, which, according to researchers, are normal symptoms of red-blood cell rupture and some are also the common side-effects of artemisinin.
The malaria parasite infects only people from female anopheles mosquitoes which transmit the disease. If a population is simultaneously treated using the Chinese drug and the treatment is repeated about 40 days later, the parasite would be cleared from their blood for an extended period, because mosquitoes have a life span of 30 days.
Artemisinin has been in use in China for more than two decades but was more widely from 2001, when the WHO recommended its use in countries where resistance to malaria was undermining the effectiveness of other drugs.
The Minister for Health and Social Welfare, Dr Seif Suleiman Rashid, said recently that the country had during the past five years (2008-2013) witnessed a reduction in malaria transmission by 50 per cent, from 18 per cent in the financial year 2007/8 to nine per cent in 2011/12.
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