Study Questions Malaria Preventive for Pregnant Women, Say It Is Doing More Bad Than Good

Malaria can be very dangerous for pregnant women and their unborn child. This may cause life-threatening anemia to the mother while the unborn child may have poor nutrition because the infected red blood cells tend to clump in the placenta.

Although more attention is given to incidence of ZIka virus, Malaria has taken far greater number of lives. The World Health Organization (WHO) says that there are about 214 million cases of malaria that was recorded in 2015 with a total mortality of 438,000. WHO also revealed that at least 88 percent of all malaria cases and about 90 percent of malaria-induced deaths in the same year happened in sub-Saharan Africa, cidrap.umn.edu reported.

To protect women and their children, health agencies utilize "intermittent preventive treatment," or I.P.T, where all pregnant women in areas like this are given doses of anti-malarial drugs regularly, whether or not they have been infected by the disease.

There have been some disagreements on how to properly do it, and the recent study that was published by The New England Journal of Medicine made it even worse. According to NY Times, in order for malaria to be cured, everyone in the field essentially uses a mixture of two-drug cocktails containing artemisinin which is a derivative of the sweet wormwood plant.

However, to prevent it in pregnant women, WHO suggest only an older drug combination sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine, more commonly known as Fansidar, even though more and more people are becoming resistant to this drug in Africa.

The study which is led by scientists from Uganda and the University of California, San Francisco discovered that women who received sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine to prevent malaria were more likely to develop symptoms related to the sickness during pregnancy and to have parasites in their placenta when they gave birth. There was a similar study done in Kenya which had a similar result in 2015.

Some health experts believe that the World Health Organization should change this recommendation. Dr. Grant Dorsey, an author of the Uganda study and researches on malaria at U.C.S.F said that the process is shocking. However, other groups fighting malaria do not support the suggestion.

According to Dr. Estrella Lasry, a tropical medicine adviser at Doctors Without Borders said that the old method may not be perfect but it still prevents deaths. "Using artemisinin for prevention could speed the emergence of parasites resistant to it."

"We need artemisinin for treatment, so we don't want to burn it out," she said.