Malaria could be quickly eliminated in south-east Asia by an all-out effort to dose whole populations with drugs that treat the disease, regardless of whether people have symptoms or are healthy, say experts. The radical programme may be the best way to outpace rapidly spreading resistance to anti-malarial drugs, they believe.

An experimental programme which involved giving drugs to 365,000 people in malarial “hotspots” across 18,000 square kilometres of Myanmar has succeeded in substantially reducing and even sometimes clearing malaria completely from villages.

The Oxford University team who ran the study believe this “nuclear option” is urgently needed to wipe out malaria in south-east Asia before growing resistance to the best drugs now available – the artemisinin compounds – spreads to India and Africa.

They are calling for urgent political and financial backing from donor governments and the World Health Organization. “It is hard. People don’t want to move outside their comfort zone of the current approaches. We need very high level political commitment and the money,” said Professor Sir Nick White, chair of the Mahidol Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit which ran the study and board member of the Worldwide Antimalarial Resistance Network (Warn). “We think the risk to the rest of the world is significant and we can’t afford to let this get out of control. If it extends to India and Africa that’s it. All the gains could be reversed.”(theguardian)…[+]