About 50 cases of potentially drug-resistant malaria have been identified in Battambang province’s Samlot district since a surveillance program started there in September, health workers said.
Malaria cases were reported if combination treatment did not clear parasites within three days—a sign of tolerance to the drug artemisinin.
An investigation was scheduled to begin this week into why the cluster occurred in Samlot district and why fewer cases were found in surrounding areas, said Dr Najibullah Habib, project manager for artemisinin resistance containment at the World Health Organization.
“We had not found that many previously because now we are actively looking for them,” Dr Habib said. “Any number of cases is high. We want to reduce the number to zero.”
Western Cambodia along the Thai border has been the epicenter of efforts to contain drug resistance since its emergence was detected in 2007. The Health Ministry’s national malaria center, WHO and partner organizations in 2009 began a $22.5 million cross-border containment project, which apparently reduced malaria in target zones.
There are fears that if the parasite develops resistance in Cambodia, it could spread across Asia and then to Africa, where 90 percent of the 1 million malaria deaths worldwide occur each year.
A recent system piloted at seven health facilities used text messages to alert the nearest supervisor to take action and plot its location on a map, said Steve Mellor, information systems manager for the NGO Malaria Consortium.
“It allows reporting of cases in real time and facilitates an immediate response from the district malaria staff,” Mr Mellor said. “The Day 3 system allows for the real-time mapping of cases and helps to identify hot spots of potentially drug-resistant malaria.”
The Malaria Consortium and the Google-funded NGO Instedd are designing a second system for the national malaria center to track all cases of malaria, he said. Software, scheduled to go live by August, would allow about 150 community-based malaria workers to report infections via text message, he said. “In time, we may expand to cover all [about 1,500] village malaria workers.”
