Information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies since 1927
Rome (Fides Service) - A combination of medicines used to prevent pneumonia and opportunistic bacterial infections in patients with HIV/AIDS unexpectedly shown itself to be highly effective for the prevention of malaria.
The combination of Trimetoprim-sulfametoxazol (TS) is known to reduce morbidity and mortality of certain opportunistic infections in people infected with HIV, and is highly recommended for patients in an advanced state of infection. TS however shares several characteristics with anti-malaria therapy, Sulfadoxin-pirimetamine (SP), and this raised concern that its use might increase the number of varieties of the malaria parasite resistant to treatment with SP, and therefore the risk that SP therapy may fail in patients with HIV who contract malaria.
This fear led a group of researchers from America and from Bamako University in Mali, a country where malaria is endemic to study 160 children aged 5 to 15 treated with TS and a group of 80 children under control who had received no preventative treatment. In the group treated with TS only one clinical episode of malaria was noted. In the control group instead, there were 72 episodes of malaria and three cases of unsuccessful SP therapy.
The absence of episodes of malaria in the TS group precluded significant comparison of the effectiveness of SP in both groups but revealed that TS is an extremely effective means to prevent malaria and reduce its impact by 99.5 per cent. (AP) (28/10/2005 Agenzia Fides; Righe:24; Parole:278)
