Herbal Drug Widely Embraced in Treating Resistant Malaria

After years of hesitation, world health agencies are racing to acquire 100 million doses of a Chinese herbal drug that has proved strikingly effective against malaria, one of the leading killers of the poor.The drug, artemisinin (pronounced are-TEM-is-in-in), is a compound based on qinghaosu, or sweet wormwood. First isolated in 1965 by Chinese military researchers, it cut the death rate by 97 percent in a malaria epidemic in Vietnam in the early 1990’s.

It is rapidly replacing quinine derivatives and later drugs against which the disease has evolved into resistant strains.

To protect artemisinin from the same fate, it will be given as part of multidrug cocktails.

Until recently, big donors like the United States and Britain had opposed its use on a wide scale, saying it was too expensive, had not been tested enough on children and was not needed in areas where other malaria drugs still worked.

Unicef, the United Nations Children’s Fund, which procures drugs for the world’s poorest countries, opposed its use during an Ethiopian epidemic last year, saying that there was too little supply and that switching drugs in mid-outbreak would cause confusion.

But now almost all donors, Unicef and the World Bank have embraced the drug. The new Global Fund for AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria has given 11 countries grants to buy artemisinin and has instructed 34 others to drop requests for two older drugs — chloroquine and sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine — and switch to the new one.

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