Health News
Cambodian malaria deaths up 58 per cent
Aug 5, 2009, 3:58 GMT
Phnom Penh - Cambodian officials said the country's malaria death toll rose by 58 per cent in the first six months of this year because of the early onset of the rainy season and delays in distributing mosquito nets, local media reported Wednesday.
Doung Socheat, director of the National Center for Parasitology Entomology and Malaria Control, said 103 people had died from malaria from January to June compared with 65 deaths in the same period last year, The Phnom Penh Post reported.
He said 27,105 people had contracted the illness in the first six months of this year, compared with 25,033 in the same period last year.
'This year, we had an early rainy season, and we were a bit late in distributing mosquito nets to people,' Doung Socheat said.
The figures came a week after a study revealed an increased resistance to treatment in some malaria strains in Cambodia.
The study, published Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine, said the parasites showed resistance to artemisinin, the drug most commonly used to treat malaria.
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MacAug 5th, 2009 - 05:47:12
The difficulty of protecting the people of Cambodia from this disease is immense. Farmers are isolated from medical help often, and just scraping together a living at survival level takes all the energy and time the families have. they play, laugh, and treat each other with love, but have little time to manage mosquito bites and nets. I have really little more to say, but this disease is outrunning the medical developments, and since the countries with money don't have the disease in any significant numbers, the focus is not there.
It may develop strains uneffected by current meds, and become a huge tragedy wherever mosquitoes fly.
Not sure how we wake up to so many potentially high risk to humans diseases, but the wealthy countries need to wake up to the plight of the third world countries, or this will cross many borders not caring about how thin or thick the wallet is.
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