Drug-resistant strains wreaking havoc.

• Position: Malaria - Brief article

Malaria is one of the most deadly infectious diseases in the world today, claiming the lives of more than 500,000 people every year, and the recent emergence of parasites resistant to current treatments threatens to undermine efforts to control the disease. Researchers, however, are onto a new strategy to defeat drug-resistant strains of the parasite.

Christine Hrycyna and Jean Chmielski, both professors in the Department of Chemistry at Purdue University, West Lafayette, Ind., along with Rowena Martin of the Research School of Biology at the Australian National University, Canberra, point out that the parasite Plasmodium falciparum, which causes the most severe form of the disease, is found in nearly 100 countries that, all totaled, are home to about half of the world's population.

Every day, P. falciparum and its relatives hitch rides via mosquitoes to find a human home. An effective vaccine remains elusive and the continuing emergence of drug-resistant parasites is cause for alarm. The good news is that these...