The next challenge in malaria control - artemisinin resistant parasites

Anopheles mosquito, Wikimedia Commons

Sometimes the news about malaria is good, as recently when deaths from malaria were reported to be decreasing, even if inexplicably, and sometimes it's not so good.  Last week saw two not-so-good stories -- one in The Lancet and one in Science -- about the increase in anti-malarial resistance in the Plasmodium falciparum parasite.  The Lancet paper documents this on the border between Thailand and Burma, and the Science paper reports the identification of the genome region in the parasite that is responsible for this newly developing resistance.  Because the parasites are becoming resistant to the best anti-malarial in use today, arteminisin, this is a serious issue.

The Science paper sets the stage:

Artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACTs) are the first-line treatment in nearly all malaria-endemic countries and are central to the current success of global efforts to control and eliminate Plasmodium falciparum malaria. Resistance to artemisinin (ART) in P. falciparum has been confirmed in Southeast Asia, raising concerns that it will spread to sub-Saharan Africa, following the path of chloroquine and anti-folate resistance. ART resistance results in reduced parasite clearance rates (CRs) after treatment...

As the BBC piece about this story says, "In 2009 researchers found that the most deadly species of malaria parasites, spread by mosquitoes, were becoming more resistant to these drugs in parts of western Cambodia."  This will make it much harder to control the disease in this area, never mind eradicate it.

Most malaria deaths occur in sub-Saharan Africa, and the spread of resistance to this part of the world would have disastrous public health consequences.  There is no therapy waiting in the wings to replace ACTs.  Whether the newly identified resistance is because infected mosquitoes have moved the 500 miles from the initial sites where resistance was found toward the border or because the parasites spontaneously developed resistance on their own is not known.  If the latter, this suggests that resistance is likely to arise de novo anywhere that artemisinin is in use -- and that's everywhere malaria is found, as ACTs are the most effective treatment currently in use.

This is, of course, evolution in action, artificial selection in favor of resistant parasites.  It's artificial because we're controlling 'nature' and how it screens.  Normally, selection that's too strong for the reproductive power of the selected species can mean doom -- extinction.  Blasting the species with a lethal selective factor can do that.  In this case, we'd like to extinctify the parasite.  But selection in a rapidly reproducing species is difficult because if any resistance mutations exist, the organisms bearing them have a relative smorgasbord of food -- hosts not hosting other parasite individuals, and this can give them an emormous selective advantage.  So the artificial selection against susceptibility is also similarly strong selection for resistance.

Unfortunately the development of resistance is inevitable when a strong selective force such as a drug against an infectious agent is in widespread use against a prolific target.  And it shows why the idea that Rachel Carson was personally responsible for millions of deaths from malaria because she pointed out in her 1962 book, Silent Spring, the harmful environment effects of DDT, an insecticide that effectively kills non-resistant mosquitoes, is short-sighted.  If its use against mosquitoes had been widespread and sustained, it would have long ago lost its efficacy.

The inevitable rise of resistance to treatment is why prevention or, even better, eradication are the preferred approaches.  Unfortunately developing a vaccine against malaria is proving to be a scientific challenge, and similarly evolutionary considerations will apply; and eradication, while doable in theory, is a political and economic challenge, and could involve the same resistance phenomenon if not done right.  So, the documented rise of drug resistant P. falciparum on the Thai Burma border is a severe blow.

We don't happen to know what, if any, intermediate strategies are being considered or tried.  Multiple moderate attacks, with different pesticides or against various aspects of the ecology or life-cycle might not wipe individuals out so quickly, but may 'confuse' them so that no resistance mechanism can arise because those bearing the new mutation protecting from agent X would be vulnerable to agent Y.  A complex ecology of modest selective factors, could possibly reduce the parasite population to a point where it really did become lethally vulnerable to some wholesale assault.

Or would it be necessary to accept some low level, but not zero, rate of infection to prevent major resistance?   Small pox and polio would seem to suggest that real eradication is possible, but how typical that can be expected to be, is unknown (to us).