Drug-Resistant Malaria May Pose Major Threat

Posted by timothy on Saturday February 21, 2015 @11:35AM from the not-just-crazy-dream-pills dept.

According to Newsweek, "A strain of drug-resistant malaria that was discovered last summer along the Thailand-Cambodia border has been been spreading throughout Southeast Asia, to Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia and Myanmar." Specifically, the samples are resistant to anti-malarial artemisinin. The study analyzed more than 900 blood samples from malaria patients at over 55 different sites in Myanmar. The results showed that the drug-resistant bug was widespread, and dangerously close to the Indian border in the country’s Sagaing region. "Our study shows that artemisinin resistance extends over more of southeast Asia than had previously been known, and is now present close to the border with India,” wrote the researchers in the study abstract.

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Re:One of these days Mother Nature is going to dec by BoRegardless · 2015-02-21 13:03 · Score: 4, Informative

Indeed, major pandemics have been documented throughout the last 2000 years. Air travel today, just means they happen much faster.
The average person thinks modern medicine and hospitals can "take care of everything" but plans can't be made when a pandemic strikes 20 or 25% of the population who all want to go to the hospital in the same time period.
The WWI-1918 "Spanish Flu" was perhaps the last major pandemic, infecting 1 out of 3 people in the world and killing 10% of the world's population in about 18 months.