Malaria Drugs Fuelling Antibiotic Resistance

Some commonly used malaria drugs may boost up the risk of resistance to a widely used class of antibiotics, despite never having taken the drugs before, a new Canadian study unfolds.

Rectal swabs from more than 500 villagers were checked for the bacteria, including those for E.coli and Salmonella.

Despite clear indications that these people have had no previous contact with such class of antibioticdefine drugs, researchers found that 4.8 percent of the people monitored had high resistance to Ciprofloxacin - an antibiotic from the fluoroquinolones family, which is chemically related to chloroquine, compared to the 4 percent found in US intensive care units where the drug is used intensively.

Tracking the cause of resistance, the researchers discovered that most of the study participants had been administered chloroquine - a drug that is commonly used to threat malaria. Interestingly, chloroquine has a composition similar to that of fluoroquinolones, researchers marked.

"This means that chloroquine use for malaria may make the fluoroquinolones less effective for many common tropical diseases such as typhoid fever, diarrhoeal illnesses, and possibly also tuberculosis and pneumonia in the developing world," Dr Michael Silverman from the Lakeridge Health Centre, Ontario marked.

"Together, these data suggest that we must focus our efforts on prevention of malaria using mosquito-control measures such as bednets and by developing vaccines," he added.

Malaria, an infectious disease caused by infected mosquitoes is most widespread in tropical and subtropical regions. Commonly associated with poverty, the typical symptoms include fever, chills, nausea, flu-like illness. In severe cases the infection can prove fatal.

Each year, approximately 515 million cases of malaria are reported worldwide, of which nearly 3 million die.