Malaria treatment fails for first time in UK

Doctors have warned that a key malaria treatment has failed for the first time in patients being treated in the UK, but insisted it was too early to panic.

In early signs that the parasite is evolving resistance to front-line drugs, the treatment was proven unable to cure four patients that all visited Africa, and while the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine reassured that it was too early to panic, the news has encouraged the need for an urgent appraisal of drug-resistance levels in Africa.

Following foreign travel, between 1,500 and 2,000 people are treated for malaria in the UK each year, the majority of which are treated with artemether-lumefantrine.

The clinical reports, detailed for the first time in the Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy journal, showed that the four patients responded to therapy initially, but were readmitted a month later as the infection rebounded. All of the patients, who had visited Uganda, Angola and Liberia, were eventually treated using other therapies.

A number of doctors have expressed their opinion that it is too early to fully evaluate the significance of the findings, but larger studies are needed to explore the findings further.

Dr Colin Sutherland, of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, told the BBC News website: "It's remarkable there's been four apparent failures of treatment, there's not been any other published account [in the UK].

"It does feel like something is changing, but we're not yet in a crisis. It is an early sign and we need to take it quite seriously as it may be snowballing into something with greater impact. There has been anecdotal evidence in Africa of treatment failure on a scale that is clinically challenging. We need to go in and look carefully at drug efficacy."