An Iron Fist Joins the Malaria Wars - New York Times

The war on malaria — in theory more winnable than the war on AIDS because a cure exists — is instead being lost, Dr. Kochi says. In the 1960's, malaria was considered potentially eradicable: DDT and chloroquine, a synthetic form of quinine, had been invented, and much of the tropics were under colonial rulers who, whatever their other faults, were good at killing mosquitoes.

Since then, DDT has been withdrawn because of its environmental damage, chloroquine and its successor, Fansidar, have become all but useless and the health systems in most of Africa and parts of Asia and Latin America have collapsed.

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The body count is now at least one million a year, most of them children and pregnant women. There are 350 million cases of malaria each year; people may catch it repeatedly in hot seasons and be too weak to work, so it cripples rural economies

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In January, he attacked the drug industry, naming 18 companies that were selling artemisinin in single-pill form, and giving them 90 days to stop. Monotherapy encourages resistance, and if artemisinin was lost, he said, "it will be at least 10 years before a drug that good is discovered — basically, we're dead."

If the companies refused to conform, he said, he would disrupt sales of all their drugs by getting the W.H.O. to refuse to certify any drug they made for poor countries

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