Artemisinin

The artemisia plant also known as Sweet Wormwood contains artemisinin which has been used in Chinese traditional medicine for centuries in treating fevers.

The latest treatment, artemisinin, comes from a Chinese shrub.

It is up to 95 percent effective in curing uncomplicated malaria infections but, because it is derived from a plant, artemisinin is frequently in short supply, and expensive.

In another just-released study in the journal The Lancet Infectious Diseases, scientists in Thailand have found widespread malaria parasite resistance to artemisinin and combination therapies using artemisinin, considered the gold standard treatment.

But, Maitland writes, not all of the news is bad. Over the past ten years, she says, there's been an increase in funding for malaria control efforts, such as the distribution of insecticide-treated bed nets and the widespread introduction of artemisinin combination therapies, the most effective treatments at the moment.

Until now, scientists couldn’t distinguish the silent bacteria from the active ones to know whether dormant mycobacterium were being killed by different compounds. Abramovitch and colleagues developed a strain of the pathogen that glows bright green. They found it stopped glowing after artemisinin came into contact with the mycobacteria’s oxygen biosensor, presumably dying.

Artemisinin (Qinghaosu) isolated from Artemisia annua is a novel sesquiterpene lactone bearing an unusual endoperoxide function.

The practical value of artemisinin itself as a therapeutic agent has been limited by several factors, however. Artemisinin has a high rate of recrudescence [8], poor oral activity [8], a short half-life in plasma [9], and limited solubility in both water and oil [10].

The emerging resistance to artemisinin is partly due to the complexity of the parasite and the unstoppable nature of its ability to evolve. But it is also the direct result of greed, for which there is no drug or vaccine. In early 2009 the World Health Organization (WHO) announced the discovery of malaria parasites along the Thai-Cambodia border that were proving resistant to commonly used derivatives of artemisinin called artesunate and anthemeter.