Cherry-Flavored Medicine Effectively Treats Malaria in Children, Study Says
A new cherry-flavored malaria medication is easy for children to swallow and has about the same treatment success rate as Novartis' artemisinin-based combination therapy Coartem, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Lancet, Reuters reports.
For the study, researchers divided 899 children into two groups, with half receiving the new sweetened pill and the other half receiving crushed Coartem. Both drugs contained the same amount of medication. The researchers found that after 28 days, the two groups had similar rates of vomiting -- one of the most common side effects of malaria medicines -- and treatment success.
Many available malaria drugs, such as Coartem, need to be crushed before they can be administered to children, which can make them less effective and bitter tasting in water. However, the cherry-flavored pill could encourage children to take the medicine regularly because it does not taste bitter and does not need to be crushed before administration, Reuters reports. According to study author Salim Abdulla of the Ifakara Health Institute in Tanzania and colleagues, the new drug is "easy to administer, gives compliance and effective treatment; and hence facilitates adoption in malaria-control programs."
Awash Teklehaimanot of Columbia University and Haily Desta Teklehaimanot of the Center for National Health Development in Ethiopia write in a related Lancet commentary that the study will "have consequences for current clinical practice" because the new sweetened pills can "potentially enhance and promote better treatment outcomes and delay the development of drug resistance at the same time" (Kahn, Reuters, 10/14).
An abstract of the study is available online.
