Antimalarial Drugs: A Review

Abstract

Malaria causes about 400-900 million cases of fever and approximately 1-3 million deaths annually; this represents at least one death every 30 seconds. The vast majority of cases occur in children under the age of 5 years, pregnant women are also especially vulnerable. Resistance to antimalarial drugs as well as resistance of vectors to insecticides is proving to be a challenging problem in malaria control in most parts of the world. Furthermore, the difficulty of creating efficient vaccines and also adverse side-effects of the existing anti-malarial drugs highlight the urgent need for novel, well-tolerated antimalarial drugs for both prophylaxis and treatment of malaria, therefore researchers had discovered other antimalarial agents, mainly from plant sources. In this article, we would like to address current status of recent advances in malaria chemotherapy.