(Transcript from World News Radio)
Still one of the world's most prevalent diseases, malaria affects about 200 million people.
After two decades of global efforts, in the 1970s the disease was eradicated from the whole of Europe, most of North America, most of the Caribbean and large parts of South America, and Singapore, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Australia.
But in recent years, the development of drug-resistant strains and insecticide-resistant mosquitoes has seen a resurgence in the disease.
Now a group of Australian and Papua New Guinean researchers believe they have developed a treatment that can completely cure one of the most common strains of the disease.
Ryan Emery reports.
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Dr Moses Laman knows what it's like to have malaria.
"Oh, you feel really bad; within eight hours you're going down. So you feel really terrible. I've even been admitted to hospital as a child for malaria at least twice. In rural PNG, and that's tough!"
So the Papua New Guinean researcher is excited about what he and his colleagues say they've discovered.
By combining two drugs, and giving it to patients over three days, the researchers found the treatment completely eliminated the vivax (VY-vax) strain of malaria.
"So it's satisfying to not only see our work, but all the other malaria research and the time and effort and planning that malaria has recently attracted globally. And so the incidence of malaria globally, not just in Papua New Guinea, have been declining so as someone who has come from an endemic setting it's satisfying to see."
Although the incidence may be declining, a child still dies of malaria every minute in Africa.
Dr Laman and his team trialled their treatment on 250 children over two years in PNG.
They found they could kill the vivax malaria parasite in the children.
Normally, the parasite hides in the liver, re-emerging to attack the host again and again.
This treatment breaks that cycle.
Vivax malaria is not lethal, but it can make a child anaemic and vulnerable to other diseases.
Dr Laman's study was for a PhD he was undertaking, supervised by long-time malaria researcher Professor Tim Davis from the University of Western Australia's school of medicine and pharmacology.
Professor Davis says vivax malaria is a devastating disease that affects many of the world's developing countries.
"Malaria is a disease of poverty and contributes to poverty and it makes it difficult for young children to develop normally if they're recurrently unwell with infections like malaria. It also puts a big burden on the local health infrastructure. Countries like Papua New Guinea have limited resources and wealth to deal with major medical problems like malaria. If something can be done to reduce the impact, that frees up funding for use in other areas."
Professor Davis says the combination drug treatment also cures the potentially lethal form of malaria - falciparum (fal-SIP-ah-rum).
"We found that the new treatment was very effective - more effective than the currently recommended treatment with good rates of cure in both falciparum and vivax malaria. And that should translate into better health outcomes not only at an individual level, but at a community and national level as well should this be introduced, as I think it should be in future."
But the treatment still needs to be assessed and approved by the World Health Organisation and the Papua New Guinea government.
Dr Laman says PNG's existing treatment program was only relatively recently introduced.
"It's not straightforward. Once you roll out a program in a resource-limited setting, it's very tough. You can't just go and pull it back and introduce something else. It creates confusion. So there are so many issues that are practical that are yet to be sorted out."
But Dr Laman and his colleagues hope their new treatment will be adopted sooner rather than later.
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