Antimalarial Medications

 Antimalarial medications or just antimalarials are a kind of antiparasitic agent, often naturally derived, which will be wont to treat or to stop malaria, within the latter case, most often aiming at two susceptible target groups, young children and pregnant women. As of 2018, modern treatments, including for severe malaria, continued to depend on therapies deriving historically from quinine and artesunate, both parenteral (injectable) drugs, expanding from there into the many classes of available modern drugs. Incidence and distribution of the disease ("malaria burden") is expected to remain high, globally, for many years to come; moreover, known antimalarial drugs have repeatedly been observed to elicit resistance in the malaria parasite—including for combination therapies featuring artemisinin, a drug of last resort, where resistance has now been observed in Southeast Asia. As such, the needs for new antimalarial agents and new strategies of treatment (e.g., new combination therapies) remain important priorities in tropical medicine. As well, despite very positive outcomes from many modern treatments, serious side effects can impact some individuals taking standard doses (e.g., retinopathy with chloroquine, acute hemolytic anemia with tafenoquine). Specifically, antimalarial drugs could also be wont to treat malaria in three categories of people , (i) those with suspected or confirmed infection, (ii) those visiting a malaria-endemic regions who have no immunity, to stop infection via malaria prophylaxis, and (iii) or in broader groups of people , in routine but intermittent preventative treatment in regions where malaria is endemic via intermittent preventive therapy.