Malaria Journal
has published a series of articles on the World Antimalarial Resistance
Drug Network (WARN). WARN
is being launched with the aim of providing a globally co-ordinated effort to
tackle malaria, by facilitating monitoring and characterisation
of drug resistance. 

The articles
lay the case for creating WARN, which will consist of four linked
open-access global databases containing clinical, in vitro, molecular and
pharmacological data. The
databases will include freely available tools to make addition of information
straightforward, and to give researchers the opportunity to analyse and use
information from the databases in a variety of ways. Information on individual
patients will be collated in a standardised way, which should make it easier
for researchers to compare directly or pool data from different sites across
the world.

WARN’s
founders hope that the databases will help speed up the publication process for
scientists. This, in turn, means that policymakers and malaria control managers
will have access to timely information on the temporal and geographic trends of
drug resistance, allowing them to take action as soon as resistant malaria
parasites are detected.

Please
click
here to view all of the articles in the series.