Paris:
Giving babies a cheap, standard malaria treatment at key points in their first months of life can reduce their risk of falling sick with the disease, trials reported in
The Lancet said on Thursday.
Investigators gave the green light to this novel preemptive approach, although they also sounded a warning about its effectiveness in areas where the malaria parasite is resistant to the drug.
The technique has already been tried successfully among pregnant women in areas where malaria is a major problem, raising hopes that it could be adapted for the very young who bear the brunt of this disease.
Intermittent Preventative Treatment in Infants (IPTi) entails giving tiny doses of an anti-malarial at several points in the first months of a child's life.
Usually, the drug is used after infection to kill the Plasmodium falciparum parasite, transmitted in a mosquito bite, which causes malaria.
A review of six published trials of IPTi, three of them in the West African state of Ghana and the others in Mozambique and Tanzania, found that IPTi, using sulphadoxine-pyrimethadine, was both safe and effective.
Nearly 4,000 infants were given IPTi while 4,000 others were given a harmless, lookalike placebo.
There was no difference in the number of the deaths in the two groups. But there was a significant protective effect among the IPTi infants when it came to the risk of sickness in their first year of life.