Researchers from London suggested that the World Health Organization and the Global Fund for Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria, in particular, should make a better effort to implement newer and more efficient treatments. The traditional treatments for Malaria are chloroquine and Fansidar because they are cheap but, these drugs are ineffective since they often fail to fight against resistant strains of the disease. Drugs that do not work result in patients coming back to the clinic again with greater complications, such as a more severe form of the disease that often lead to death. Research has shown that a new treatment derived from a 1,500-year-old Chinese medicinal plant Artemisinin, called artemisinin-class combination therapy (ACT), is the most effective drug to treat malaria since no resistance to the drug has been recorded to date. ACT costs ten times as much as chloroquine and Fansidar at $1 to $3 per treatment. The cost of the switch from old malaria drugs to ACT should not be an issue since as more manufacturers produce the drug, the price will drop significantly as it did with AIDS drugs. With AIDS we saw what can be done when people start paying enough attention to a disease -- prices of AIDS drugs dropped from $15,000 to under $200. Link to article.
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