"the drugs are slowly dying," after decades of misuse, and that means people will die

Anthropormorphism is when people attribute human qualities to animals. What shall we call it when people attribute human qualities to pharmaceutical products? The desperately poor people smuggle and counterfeit the drugs, leading to drug resistant disease, and nobody can figure out what to do because you sure as hell don't expect those pharmaceutical companies to give the stuff away now, do you? - ed.




1. new form of malaria threatens thai-cambodia border

PAILIN, Cambodia (AP) _ O'treng village does not look like the epicenter of anything.

Just off a muddy, rutted-out road, it is nothing more than a handful of Khmer-style bamboo huts perched crookedly on stilts, tucked among a tangle of cornfields once littered with deadly land mines.

Yet this spot on the Thai-Cambodian border is home to a form of malaria that keeps rendering one powerful drug after another useless. This time, scientists have confirmed the first signs of resistance to the only affordable treatment left in the global medicine cabinet for malaria: Artemisinin.

If this drug should stop working, there would be no good replacement to combat a disease that kills 1 million people annually. As a result, international medical leaders declared this year that resistant malaria here is a health emergency.

"This is not business as usual. It's something really special, and it needs a real concerted effort," said Dr. Nick White, a malaria expert at Mahidol University in Bangkok, who has spent decades trying to eradicate the disease from Southeast Asia. "We know that children have been dying in Africa _ millions of children have died over the past three decades _ and a lot of those deaths have been attributed to drug resistance. And we know that the drug resistance came from the same place."

Malaria is just one of the leading killer infectious diseases battling back in a new and more deadly form, the AP found in a six-month look at the soaring rates of drug resistance worldwide. After decades of the overuse and misuse of antibiotics, diseases like malaria, tuberculosis and staph have started to mutate. The result: The drugs are slowly dying.

read more @ taiwan news

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