Drug Resistance

Surveillance for drug-resistant parasites in human blood is a major effort in malaria control.

We review some contributions that early efficacy studies of antimalarial treatment brought to clinical pharmacology, including convincing documentation of atebrine-resistant malaria in the 1940s, prior to the launching of what soon became first-choice antimalarials, chloroquine and amodiaquine.

The LDR-FMA described here allows a discriminant genotyping of resistance alleles in the pvdhfr, pvdhps, and pvmdr1 genes and can be used in large-scale surveillance studies.

Intermittent preventive treatment of infants (IPTi) with sulphadoxine pyrimethamine (SP) is recommended as an additional malaria control intervention in high transmission areas of sub-Saharan Africa, provided its protective efficacy is not compromised by SP resistance.

Multidrug-resistant Plasmodium falciparum malaria parasites pose a threat to effective drug control, even to artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACTs).

This technique for optical mapping of multiple malaria genomes allows for whole genome comparison of multiple strains and can assist in identifying genetic variation and sequence contig assembly.

The study showed significant association of three loci in the human genome with the ability of patients to clear drug-resistant P. falciparum in samples taken from five countries distributed across sub-Saharan Africa.

Naturally acquired blood-stage infections of the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum typically harbour multiple haploid clones.

There are many different types of migrants and types of movements and no single commonly agreed definition for transit migration.

Our findings suggest that cross-resistance between drugs targeting the same enzyme reflect the fitness landscapes associated with each particular drug and the position of the genotype on both landscapes.