Chloroquine-resistant falciparum malaria strikes village near Panama City
The US military famously beat back malaria and yellow fever in Panama to build the Panama Canal. (The French and the Scots previously tried the same, with disastrous results – the French lost some 20,000 workers to disease.) William Gorgas sanitated the canal zone, providing electricity and piped water, draining standing water, oiling larval sites, and fumigating homes. He left a hero, although malaria still plagued the rest of Panama outside the zone, and even sporadically emerged inside the canal area. Later campaigns with DDT and other insecticides brought malaria under control in most of the country.
Since the 1970s, malaria has been under control in Panama, but is now “the most important reemerging disease and one of the major public health problems” in Panama, according to researchers from the Instituto Conmemorativo Gorgas de Estudio de la Salud. Malaria cases quadrupled between 2000 and 2004, and in 2004, a chloroquine-resistant strain of falciparum malaria reached the doorstep of the canal, in a Kuna settlement called Chepo. The introduction of this parasite, which according to the researchers at the Gorgas Institute, has established endemic transmission, bodes poorly for the rest of Panama. Given decades of effective malaria control, most of the population has little or no acquired immunity.
For more:
Franklyn Samudio et al, “Prevalence of Plasmodium falciparum mutations associated with antimalarial drug resistance during an epidemic in Kuna Yala, Panama, Central America,” American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene,” 73(5), 2005:
