A Brief Review on Malaria and Current Antimalarial Drugs

Abstract

Malaria remains one of the most devastating infectious diseases in the world, both from the point of view of mortality and morbidity and its worldwide occurrence in tropical and subtropical regions. It is one of the most severe public health problems in many developing countries including India, where young children and pregnant women are the most affected. The emergence, spread and severity of the disease had led to the development of currently available antimalarial drugs as an approach of modern malaria chemotherapy. However, because of rapid development of resistance has severely limited their use alone, but in combination with the drugs of same category or with other drugs could be used successfully in the treatment and prevention of acute and sever cases of chloroquine or multidrug-resistant P. falciparum and other forms of malaria infection. Moreover, in this challenging situation, based on novel rational drug design and traditional random screening method of drug discovery programs multiple general approaches can be pursued towards development of new antimalarial drugs with novel modes of action, which would be effective against multi-drug resistant malaria.