MALARIA THE MIGHTY

DRUG-RESISTANT MALARIA SPREADS and experts fear strain could upend years of eradication efforts:

When TranViet Hung was a soldier patrolling these forested hills in southern Vietnam six years ago, he came down with fever and chills.

He tested positive for malaria and spent a few days recovering in government clinic.

Now Mr. Hung, 37, shrugs off the incident as an occupational hazard of working in this corner of  Binh Phuoc Province, a malaria hot spot along the Vietnam's porous border with Cambodia.

''We have modern technology,'' he said. ''If we don't feel well, we'll see a doctor, and everything will be fine.''

Death from malaria are practically unheard o nowadays in Vietnam, and only 85 people died from  mosquito-borne disease across mainland Southeast Asia in 2015-

Down from 4,000 people 15 years earlier, according to Global Health Group/, a think tank based at the University of California, San Francisco.

But a new,  drug-resistant strain of the disease, impervious to artemisinin and another popular drug with which it is frequently paired, piperaquine, threatened to upend years of worldwide eradication efforts-

Straining health care systems and raising the prospect that the death toll could increase once again.