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NAIROBI, Kenya - Every day since Tuesday, I've been taking a pink pill called Malarone to keep from getting malaria while on a reporting trip to Africa. Malarone isn't cheap - 40 pills cost $182, or $4.55 a pill.
The high cost of medications such as Malarone is one reason for the excitement about a new "wonder" drug that could reduce the 1-million deaths caused by malaria each year. In Kenya alone, more than 70 children a day die from the mosquito-borne disease, and 70 percent of the country's 30-million people have been stricken at least once.
As reported in the current issue of Nature, the new drug mimics an ancient herbal treatment based on the sweet wormwood plant. Because the drug is synthetic, it can be produced more cheaply and quickly than using extracts from the plant, which takes 18 months to grow.
Nicknamed OZ, it has a truly international flavor: It was developed in India by U.S., Swiss, British and Australian researchers and will be tested on volunteers in England. But the big breakthrough came during Chairman Mao Tse-tung's cultural revolution in China.
"This history of this drug is fascinating," Dr. Paul O'Neill of the University of Liverpool told London's Daily Telegraph.
Rejecting Western medicine and hoping to reduce North Vietnamese troop casualties caused by malaria, Chinese scientists began looking at herbal remedies, including a tea made from sweet wormwood.
In the early 1970s, they found that active compounds in the tea cleared malaria parasites from the body faster than any other drugs. As word of the findings emerged, the World Health Organization tried to contact Chinese officials but had no luck.
The U.S. military started hunting for the plant, which had spread from its native Asia to other parts of the world. They finally found it - growing wild along the Potomac River around Washington.
Researchers hail OZ as the biggest breakthrough in years against malaria, caused by parasites in the saliva of female mosquitoes. The disease is said to have killed more people than all wars and plagues combined. Among its many famous victims were Ernest Hemingway, who survived, and Alexander the Great, who did not.
"It's a miserable feeling," says Daniel Kibe, a laboratory technician at Nairobi Women's Hospital and who contracted the disease three years ago while on vacation in Mombasa, on Kenya's coast. "High fever, vomiting, you feel pain in your joints, you get very sleepy."
The risk of malaria is low in Nairobi, which is higher, cooler and drier than other parts of the country. Like Kibe, most Nairobi residents and tourists are bitten while visiting along the coast or in the lake district of western Kenya.
Still, the women's hospital sees at least two or three cases of malaria each week. Pregnant women are especially vulnerable because their bodies are less able to ward off disease, and they are more apt to develop anemia. And one recent patient - a man - fell into a coma after contracting a rare form of malaria that deprives the brain of oxygen. He was transferred to Kenya's biggest hospital and is expected to survive.
If it lives up to its promise as a cheap, effective drug, OZ could be a boon to poor countries like Kenya, where many people are unable to afford mosquito netting, repellents and costly treatments.
"The main thing for us is an affordable drug," says Dr. Janet Muriuki of the women's hospital. "But it must also undergo (clinical) trials because there are different types of mosquitoes and different types of malaria. Will it work against the type of malaria we have here?"
Indeed, the once-common antimalarial drug Chloroquine is rarely used today because the parasites have grown resistant to it.
Like me, many American visitors to Kenya or other African nations take Malarone, a combination of drugs considered effective in preventing malaria. The pills, which can be obtained only by a doctor's prescription, are taken daily, starting two days before you arrive in a country and continuing seven days after you leave.
But there's a far cheaper alternative to this $4.55-a pill regimen. Dr. Muriuki notes that exactly the same combination of drugs is sold under the name Paludrine in Britain and Kenya - and the pills can be bought over the counter in Kenya for only about 23 cents a pill.
Her suggestion for Americans who feel they're getting ripped off by high drug prices at home? Take a couple of Malarone pills before you leave and buy Paludrine when you get here.
Susan Taylor Martin can be contacted at susan@sptimes.com