Treating malaria in remote areas

In a study published recently in BMC Infectious Diseases, Melba Gomes and colleagues have shown that administering artemisinin derivatives via the rectal route has the potential for early treatment of malaria in areas where health care professionals are not available to give injectable anti-malaria treatment.

The study looked at data from 1167 patients who took part in 15 clinical trials of rectal artemisisin derivatives. The data were pooled to compare how rapidly the malarial parasites were cleared in those patients who received the rectal artemisisin derivatives against those who received injectable quinine or injectable artemisinin.

They found that malaria parasites were cleared more rapidly in those patients who received the rectal artemisisin. In fact a single higher dose of rectal artesunate treatment was five times more likely to achieve >90% parasite reductions at 24 hours than were multiple lower doses of rectal artesunate, or a single lower dose administration of rectal artemether.

The full article can be seen here http://www.biomedcentral.com/content/pdf/1471-2334-8-39.pdf