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Mr Tavul attends workshop in Cambodia
Scientific officer Mr Livingstone Tavul from the Molecular Parasitology Laboratory, Vector Borne Diseases unit in Madang reports on a workshop he attended in Cambodia from the 19th-23rd March 2007, on new in vitro techniques to test P. falciparum sensitivity against antimalarial drugs.

The workshop took place at the National Center for Parasitology, Entomology and Malaria Control with Pastuer-Institute in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

The World Health Organisation through the Asian Collaborative Training Network for Malaria (ACTMALaria) funded the workshop.

Participants came from ACT member countries including Indonesia, China, Cambodia, Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia and Thailand.

I was a non-member participant since PNG is not a member of ACT.

The workshop was carried out to enable the participants to share among themselves the experience about the in vitro testing using current available methods.

We were also taught new in vitro methods, which include ELISA pLDH and HRPII and SYBR Green.

The standardization and quality control of in vitro testing in the field was strengthened during the workshop.

Participants were encouraged to develop the use of in vitro testing back in their countries to provide useful information to their national malaria control programme.

Providing better antimalarial drug use policies results, obtained from therapeutic efficacy tests, are vitally important.

In vitro tests and molecular markers are tools that assist in complementing therapeutic efficacy tests results.

The usefulness of in vitro tests is obvious especially with the current increasing usage of combination therapy.

Using in vitro tests enables monitoring of each drug in a combine therapy.

By doing so the tests detect, as an early warning system, the occurrence of in vitro reduced sensitivity to one of the drugs in the combination therapy.

Conducting drug efficacy tests in human subjects is often impossible due to ethical problems, non-availability of drugs as single therapy and the need to study large number of patients.

By attending the workshop and learning the new in vitro techniques I am very hopeful that our Madang P. falciparum culture lab will develop and establish one of the in vitro techniques to monitor the susceptibility of the current antimalarial drugs in use.

By doing so, we will strengthen our current malaria research capacity and also provide useful information to the national malaria control program in PNG.

The key facilitators of the workshop came from WHO, Groupe Hospitalier Bichat Claude Bernard, Paris France; Vienna, Austria; and the USA.

I would like to thank Dr Ivo Mueller for recommending me to the workshop and PNGIMR Director Peter Siba for accepting the invitation from WHO/ACTMAlaria for me to attend the workshop.