RESEARCH Open Access Use of proscribed chloroq T

Full list of author information is available at the end of the articleBackground Undeniably, anti-malarial drug resistance remains a major obstacle to malaria control in the disease endemic areas. Based on reports of high chloroquine (CQ) treatment fail-ure in Ghana and the recommendations of the World Health Organization (WHO) [1-3], CQ was replaced with artemisinin-based combination therapy (ACT) in 2004. Interestingly, high prevalence of CQ resistant mutants have been reported in different parts of the country by several researchers after the change in the malaria treat-ment policy [4,5] though others have reported decreased trend in prevalence and resistance in vitro [6,7]. Substitution of adenylate with cytidylate at position 76 of Pfcrt gene which changes lysine to threonine (K76 to T76) is a single molecular marker that strongly correlates with CQ drug resistance in Plasmodium falciparum in most malaria endemic areas [8,9]. Similarly, other muta-tions at different codons of pfcrt gene have also shown association with CQ resistance [8,10,11]