China's anti-malaria drug hailed as 'life-saving' in Togo

Health professionals of Togo, in the malaria thorn West Africa, welcome the 2015 Medical Nobel Prize awarded to the Chinese researcher Tu Youyou for having discovered artemisinin, a novel therapy against malaria.

"It is international acknowledgement that is worth what have been done to reduce malaria, especially in African countries," Awokou Fantche, malariologist and coordinator of national malaria control program of Togo told Xinhua.

According to this malaria specialist, artemisinin and related based combination drugs are adopted in malaria management policy in Togo since the year 2000.

But it is five years later, from 2005, that artemisinin based combination drugs are systemically used to treat non severe malaria cases in Togo health sector, he explained.

"Many lives have been saved and the drugs's efficiency allows expecting a better tomorrow," Fantche said.

He emphasized that malaria patients are reported to show good tolerance to artemisinin based combination drugs and that no side effects are revealed.

He added that the efficiency rate of these drugs is still high, above 95 percent, and has induced a great change and a further step in the fight against malaria in Togo.

In 2014, the West African country registered 1.3 million confirmed malaria cases of which over 80 percent were treated successfully with artemisinin based combinations.

"I am proud that Tu Youyou is awarded the Nobel Prize and I encourage her to work more for better management of malaria," the pediatrician Palanga-Awoussi Amy told Xinhua, adding that she knows arteminsinin and its based combinations more than 13 years ago.

The child health specialist is a practitioner in the Regional Central Hospital of Lome Commune where malaria is, as at national level, the primary causes of consultations.

She pointed out that with artemisinin and its related combination drugs patients feel better just the second and third day of cure, in both serious and simple malaria where they are respectively used.