While the news reports don’t state which drugs Cloony took to beat malaria,
It is most likely that he was treated with artemisinin-based combination
therapies (ACTs), which became available in the late 1990s and are now in
widespread use. If that is the case, he has benefited from mouse studies
done in China the late 1960s and early 1970s when over 100 traditional
herbal remedies were screened in a rodent model of malaria for anti-malarial
activity (1). Eventually “Project 523” scored a hit when Professor Tu
Youyou identified an extract of the plant qinghao, scientific name Artemisia
annua, which had good anti-malarial activity, leading to the development of
the artemisinin-based anti-malarials which have become the first-line
treatment for malaria in the past decade.
