I just came back from a 10-day trip to Arizona where I hiked down the Grand Canyon and also visited one of the country's top parasite experts. As a result of my visit, I will have extensive reviews on parasites in the next few weeks. One of the worst parasite infections in the world though is malaria. It kills one African child every 30 seconds. Malaria causes about 300 million illnesses a year and at least 1 million deaths, 90 percent of them in Africa and most of them children under 5, and it costs Africa about $12 billion a year. Today we learn though that a very popular anti-parasite drug, artemisinin (pronounced are-TEM-is-in-in) or sweet wormwood, is highly effective for malaria as it cut the death rate by 97 percent in a malaria epidemic in Vietnam in the early 1990s. Thank God for safe and inexpensive natural treatments to diseases like malaria. SO, the take home message folks is to ALWAYS avoid the expensive and highly toxic anti-malarial prophylaxis drugs if you ever travel to a malaria-infected country. Use a good-quality wormword product.
New York Times May 10, 2004