Herbal Drug Widely Embraced in Treating Resistant Malaria

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http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/10/health/10MALA.html?th

 

May 10, 2004Herbal Drug Widely Embraced in Treating Resistant MalariaBy DONALD

G. McNEIL Jr.

 

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.

 

" We want countries to move very rapidly to use it as a first-line treatment, "

said Dr. Vinand Nantulya, the fund's malaria adviser. The fund expects to spend

$450 million on the drug over the next five years, he said.

 

The World Health Organization, a United Nations agency based in Geneva,

estimates that 100 million doses will be needed by late 2005.

 

Malaria causes about 300 million illnesses a year, and at least 1 million

deaths, 90 percent of them in Africa and most of them children under 5. Despite

more than a century of eradication efforts, the disease is endemic from the

Mekong Delta in Vietnam to the Amazon Basin in Brazil, and is particularly

severe across central Africa, from the cane fields of Mozambique to the oases of

Somalia to the rubber plantations of Liberia.

 

Like many tropical disease drugs, artemisinin is a fruit of military research.

Chinese scientists first isolated it in 1965 while seeking a new antimalarial

treatment for Vietnamese troops fighting American forces, said Dr. Nelson Tan,

medical director of Holley Pharmaceuticals, which makes the drug in Chongqing,

China.

 

Another antimalarial drug still in use, mefloquine, was isolated at the Walter

Reed Army Institute of Research in 1963 for American troops in the same jungles.

Under the name Lariam, it is still issued to troops and sold to travelers.

 

Artemisinin, which has no significant side effects, quickly reduces fevers and

rapidly lowers blood-parasite levels, which can keep small outbreaks in

mosquito-infested areas from becoming epidemics.

 

Two years ago, Dr. Dennis Carroll, a health adviser to the United States Agency

for International Development, said artemisinin was " not ready for prime time. "

But on April 30 at a malaria conference at the Columbia University School of

Public Health, he led a session on ways to induce farmers to plant more

wormwood.

 

Dr. Carroll said that more evidence had emerged that the drug was safe and that

older drugs were not working. Also, the creation of the Global Fund expedited

grants for it.

 

Dr. Stewart Tyson, a health expert with the British Department for International

Development, said his agency changed its opinion about the drug after its

experience in Uganda, where resistance to older drugs had climbed to 31 percent

in some areas in 2003 from 6 percent in 2000.

 

The price of artemisinin cocktails has fallen from $2 per treatment to 90 cents

or less as more companies in China, India and Vietnam have begun making them.

(Older drugs cost only 20 cents.) Novartis, the Swiss drug giant, sells its

artemisinin-lumefantrine mix, Coartem, to poor countries for 10 cents less than

it costs to make, a company official said. The same drug, under the name Riamet,

is sold to European travelers for about $20.

 

As a plant material, artemisinin cannot be patented, said Dr. Allan Schapira, a

policy specialist for the Roll Back Malaria campaign of the World Health

Organization. Nor can the simple extraction process. Some synthetics, he said,

are old and off patent, which public health officials like but pharmaceutical

companies do not, because they make a larger profit from drugs on which they

have patent monopolies.

 

No company has registered artemisinin in the United States, said Dr. Nick White,

a professor of tropical medicine at Mahidol University in Thailand, because

sales would be too small to justify the cost of seeking approval from the Food

and Drug Administration.

 

Now, with more purchases, fears of a shortage that would push prices up are

developing. The W.H.O. estimates that 100 million doses will be needed by late

2005, and the world now has only about a third of that.

 

Though it grows wild even in the United States, wormwood is cultivated only in

China, Vietnam and pilot projects in Tanzania and India. It is planted in

December and needs eight months to mature. Drug companies want firm orders from

donors before they try to triple production.

 

Dr. Tan said he had seed banks ready to plant 62,000 acres, " but we need to pay

farmers to give up other crops and arrange for fertilizer. "

 

" Time is against us, " he said.

 

Even if enough artemisinin can be made, obstacles will arise, experts warned.

For example, Dr. Kopano Mukelabai, a malaria specialist at Unicef, said

shopkeepers would have to be trained not to sell one or two pills to patients

who lacked the money for a full course of 12.

 

And what Richard Allan, director of the Mentor Initiative, a public health group

that fights malaria epidemics, called " the love of chloroquine " will have to be

broken. That quinine derivative, in use since the 1950's, is now almost useless

against parasites, but poor people still buy it because it is cheap and lowers

fever as aspirin does.

 

Also, counterfeiting will become a problem. In Kenya in 1997, Mr. Allan said, he

found 120 versions of sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine for sale, " ranging from very

good drugs to talcum powder. " A recent study of artemisinin drugs in Asia " found

that 38 percent were fakes, " he said. " We can expect the same thing to happen in

Africa. "

 

He favors giving artemisinin away to remove the counterfeiters' profit motive.

 

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

 

 

 

 

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