On the front lines of malaria elimination
Rural health centres throughout the country are leading the fight against the scourge of drug-resistant malaria. Can international organizations, local health officials and the government unite before the parasite spreads? Amid the sugar cane plantations and rice paddies of Kampong Speu, the Oral district health centre appears no different from any of its counterparts throughout the country. Yet the work being done here, and at a handful of others selected as “sentinel sites”, has global consequences. It is an integral part of a system at the forefront of the fight against drug-resistant malaria a pervasive problem in Cambodia that has the potential to spread. Here at the health centre, a team from the National Center for Malaria and the district centre’s chief work together to track malaria patients, take samples of their blood, and monitor the effectiveness of the anti-malarial drug cocktail artesunate-mefloquine, or ASMQ for short. ASMQ was first introduced here in January 2016 and scaled out nationally by the end of December, in response to the increasing failure of the previous combination therapy: dihydroartemisinin-piperaquine (DHA-PIP).
