Professor Sir Nick White, who has died of cancer aged 74, was an expert on tropical diseases and played a leading role in transforming treatments for malaria, saving millions of lives.<\/p>\n
In 1981 he read a paper published in 1979 in the Chinese Medical Journal describing how \u201cQinghaosu\u201d, a drug derived from sweet wormwood and used in traditional herbal medicine, was curing malaria with no side-effects.<\/p>\n
At the time malaria was resurgent as the Plasmodium parasites which cause the disease were becoming increasingly resistant to the drugs used to treat it. The idea that a traditional Chinese herbal medicine might offer the solution was greeted with scepticism by most global health experts, but White thought it was worth further examination.<\/p>\n
He travelled to China and brought a sample of Qinghaosu, known in English as artemisinin, back to his lab at the Mahidol Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit (MORU) in Thailand, a Wellcome Trust-funded partnership between Mahidol University in Bangkok and Oxford University\u2019s Centre for Tropical Medicine and Global Health.<\/p>\n
In early studies White and colleagues found that artemisinin, though effective, metabolised into the body so quickly that malaria sufferers needed seven doses a day. White thought the answer might be to combine it with another drug that was slower-acting but longer-lasting.<\/p>\n
Clinical trials undertaken in Asia and Africa proved the effectiveness of artemisinin combination therapy, which was found to cure 98 per cent of uncomplicated cases, while reducing infection rates.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Professor Sir Nick White, who has died of cancer aged 74, was an expert on tropical diseases and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":448459,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[59,102,44371,162599,10269,3879,2285,162598,5438,56,54,55,47868],"class_list":{"0":"post-448458","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-health","8":"tag-gb","9":"tag-health","10":"tag-malaria","11":"tag-medicine-obituaries","12":"tag-medicines","13":"tag-obituaries","14":"tag-obituary","15":"tag-science-obituaries","16":"tag-standard","17":"tag-uk","18":"tag-united-kingdom","19":"tag-unitedkingdom","20":"tag-world-health-organisation"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/448458","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=448458"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/448458\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/448459"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=448458"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=448458"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=448458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}