Feature: Ugandans hail Chinese anti-malarial drug

In the dusty township of Kireka in central Uganda, over a dozen of mothers with their children queue up at Quality Clinic, patiently waiting for medical attention.

A few tens of meters away on another street, several other patients flock another medical center also seeking for help.

According to health experts, majority of the patients in this area like in other parts of the east African country are suffering from malaria, a deadly disease spread by a female anopheles mosquito.

Government statistics show that malaria kills over 140 people mostly children and pregnant mothers in the country daily.

Although this figure is a decline from the 320 people who used to die daily because of malaria, experts still argue that the mortality rate is still highly.

The Ugandan government in 2012 started using anti-malarial drugs that contain a Chinese traditional medicine Artemisinin.

Artemisinin, according to health officials, is partly responsible for pulling down the high mortality rate of malaria in the country.

Josephine Angualia is one of the patients who has just received malaria treatment. She has had several bouts of malaria before.

"I take the full recommended dose for five days and I am fine. I have so far taken about five to six months without falling sick of malaria. This drugs seems to be so fantastic. You only need to take a lot of drinks," she told Xinhua.

She said that after taking the medicine, the body does not weaken or itch like some other anti-malaria drugs.

Caroline Alupo concurs with Angualia noting that her body does not get any negative reactions.

"You remain strong. No side effects of losing appetite, vomiting, headache and itching at all," she said.

Rachael Kanyike, a nurse at one of the clinics here argued that because of the good response to the drug, government since 2012 recommend that it is used for the treatment of malaria.

"If given in the normal dose according to the age and weight, patients take long to contract the disease," she said.

Myers Lugemwa, an anti-malaria expert told Xinhua in an interview on Tuesday that because of the artemisinin ingredient in combination with other factors like use of treated mosquito nets, malaria outbreaks in Uganda have gone down.

Lugemwa who is the head of Uganda's National Malaria Control Program, a department at the ministry of health congratulated Chinese scientist Tu Youyou who shared the 2015 Nobel Prize in medicine with William Campbell and Japanese scientist Satoshi Omura.

Irish-born Campbell and Omura won half of the prize for discovering a new drug, avermectin, that has helped the battle against river blindness and lymphatic filariasis, as well as showing effectiveness against other parasitic diseases.

Tu was awarded the other half of the prize for discovering artemisinin, a drug that has significantly reduced the mortality rates for patients suffering from malaria.

These two discoveries, according to Juleen R. Zierath, chairman of the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine have provided humankind with powerful new means to combat these debilitating diseases that affect hundreds of millions of people in the world. Endit