Artepharm, a Cantonese medical drugs laboratory, has been engaged for the past few years in a remarkable venture against malaria, a health scourge that has long plagued humanity and has been responsible for every second human death since the Middle Ages.

Having developed a treatment partially based on a molecule with a Chinese origin, Artemisinin, Artepharm has been administrating it freely and systematically to the whole population of the Comoros, which is a small archipelago inhabited by 700.000 souls in the Indian Ocean West of Madagascar.

Backed by the local Comoros government, the drug firm began distributing Artemisinin to the 36.000 inhabitants of Moheli, one of the smaller islands in the archipelago. At the end of the campaign, after a few months, the result was dramatic: infection rates that had been as high as 90% in some villages were reduced by 95%. Artepharm then began enlarging the program to the whole population of Comoros. By November of 2014, the company could claim, according to Prof. Li Guoqiao, of Guangzhou University, one of this project’s fathers, that the disease had been eradicated in Comoros.

This was a first in human history. It was also highly controversial news, as China, a total newcomer in the field of global public health, had appeared to have done something that Western medical had been trying, without success, to accomplish for ages.

But since this achievement was based on an approach which is fiercely contested by established medical experts, it remains a very contested issue. Classical malaria eradication programs in Africa and South East Asia have focused on eliminating the female Anopheles mosquitos who carry the disease through draining the ponds and stagnant pools of water where they spawn.

Artepharm, however, does not target the carrier of malaria. It instead tries to destroy the parasite germ (plasmodium) in the organism. Its remedy, Artequick, consists of nothing more than a box of four pills. Rather than being a vaccine, the pills are a strong purge that drains down the parasite. If all humans are purged at the same time, the mosquito population may remain alive and continue to sting, but will simply have no more germs to propagate.

The international public health community, however, has raised its eyebrows at this novel approach and its apparent success. A whole nation has been cured, but not according to conventional global health rules. Thus, according to Andrea Bosman, the head of the anti-malaria campaign at WHO, an entire community has served as guinea pigs in a risky experiment. Even worse, they were never advised about the potential adverse side-effects of the drug and treatment. Moreover, many local people in Comoros have complained about high fever, while admissions to hospitals in the archipelago have risen significantly following Artepharm’s malaria eradication campaign.

Western experts also suspect that the drug might be linked to four deaths recorded over the past five years, even though none of them could be directly linked to the anti-malaria pills. WHO does not appear to be hostile to Artepharm, nor does it contest the successful outcome of its campaign against malaria. It simply advocates caution in the face of this this “very, very new approach”. Bosman complains that no systematic monitoring of the campaign has been performed over the years, nor were Western style evaluation methods, such as double blind, random or placebo tests, conducted.

Another worry is that children may lose the natural “immunization” they acquired by taking the drug. Indeed, in case of a massive return of the scourge, there is no evidence that the germ will not have mutated, rendering Artequick useless. Prof Song Jianping, a professor at Guangzhou University of Chinese Medicine and head of the program, is certain that this will not happen. His team has trained more than 200 Comorans to monitor rates of malaria, with a view of preventing its return. Another means of prevention is simple, but straightforward: anyone taking the boat to any of the islands, has to take an Artequick pill before getting on board. Song also dismisses the likeliness of side effects, as the dosage of active principle is so low.

Artepharm’s President Pan Longhua and Fouad Mohadji, the Comoros vice-President and health minister have made no effort to avoid blame for this breach of the global health drug testing protocol. Through this plan, Mohadji’s, his country has become malaria-free, which can potentially save Comoros the 11 million dollars required to treat malaria victims. On top of that, people who might be stricken with malaria will instead continue to be productive workers, further boosting the local economy. For his part, Professor Song dreams of spreading his cure to the whole of Africa, “freeing the whole black continent of the germ in a decade”.

Before Song can realize this dream, however, WHO will have to certify his radical new remedy for malaria, which is shows no sign of doing anytime soon. Afriquejet.com, a francophone magazine, reports that “Chinese researchers don’t understand why their revolutionary discovery has not yet been granted the necessary license”. Fouad Mohadji goes further, suggesting that strong lobbies might be at work to slow down the certification in order to give others time to develop their own competing Artemesinin-based Combination Therapy (ACT) drug, such as Coartem, by Swiss company Novartis .

My concluding thoughts on this matter are twofold:

First, through this conceptual breakthrough, China has not only expressed its fearlessness, new vigor and inventiveness, but has also shown its determination to play a role in improving global health.

Second, the current leaders in the pharmaceutical field will play hard ball, and not gracefully concede a level playing field to Chinese drug firms. To succeed, the latter will have to fight hard, and they seem ready to do that.

For more information please click the link blow:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericrmeyer/2014/11/24/chinas-war-on-malaria-a-tiny-nation-pushed-into-a-test-tube/