"Forgotten" malaria still kills millions.

2003 OCT 8 - (NewsRx.com & NewsRx.net) -- Shivering and sweating feverishly, Felicia Egbuchue took the malaria medicine her doctor prescribed. Although it had cured her in years past, this time it didn't. She was rushed to the hospital, and hooked up to an intravenous drip.

"I have no inner strength. I feel like I'm dying," the 30-year-old university student said from her hospital bed.

Malaria, the ancient mosquito-borne disease that was rolled back by medical advances in the mid-20th century, is making a deadly comeback.

Strains of the disease are becoming increasingly resistant to treatment, infecting and killing more people than ever before - sickening as many as 900 million last year, according to estimates by the U.S. Agency for International Development.

More than 1 million people - and as many as 2.7 million by some estimates - of those victims died. The vast majority of the deaths were in Africa.

After 3 days in a private hospital in Nigeria's commercial capital of Lagos, Egbuchue recovered from what doctors said was a strain that had become resistant to many of the standard treatments.

"Malaria is something that we thought we had conquered years ago. But more and more of our people are dying from it every day," said Patrick Dike, a malaria specialist at the Lagos hospital.