A Canadian study recently discovered what seems to be a link between the usage of a common drug against malaria and the development of resistance to a certain class of antibiotics. The study was carried out on people living in remote villages in Guyana, which is located in the north of South America.

Researchers from the Lakeridge Health Centre in Oshawa chose this population to test antibiotics resistance since it is a known fact that these people have had no previous contact with such drugs. Even though the researchers expected the population to have zero resistance to antibiotics, they found out that about 4.8 percent of the people involved in the study had high resistance to ciprofloxacin, one of the most popular antibiotics used worldwide.

This represents an extremely high rate of antibiotic resistance. In American hospitals were fluoroquinolones, the class of antibiotics that ciprofloxacin is part of, are widely used, only about 4 percent of the people develop a resistance to them that is similar to the one discovered in the remote South American population.

The researchers discovered that most of the people that were included in the study had been administered chloroquine, a drug that is commonly used to threat malaria and that has a similar composition to the one fluoroquinolones antibiotics have. This made scientists think that there exists a link between the use of chloroquine and increased resistance to fluoroquinolones. This idea was later proved by lab experiments.

The discovery raises some serious concerns in the medical world. Fluoroquinolones are some of the most widely used antibiotics, and resistance to them could prove fatal for some patients. Experts say that the study prompts further research for ways to combat malaria while not interfering with other drugs.