YANGON, Myanmar — One of the world’s most challenging and deadly races is underway in the forests of this turbulent country.

A new strain of drug-resistant malaria has emerged in Myanmar just as the country is emerging from a half-century of isolation, increasing the risk that the lethal scourge will spread into India and Africa.

If the strain reaches other regions, it could undo huge gains made over the past decade – at a cost of billions – to corral the illness.

Malaria mortality has fallen 42 percent worldwide since 2000, but the disease continues to sicken more than 200 million people and kill 500,000 children a year, or about one every minute of every day, according to the World Health Organization.

Fighting malaria has been a Sisyphean task over the past century. Major attempts to eradicate the disease – caused by a parasite transmitted by a particular mosquito species – failed in part because it’s a moving target that evolves and develops resistance to drugs and pesticides.

Yet the latest push has brought eradication in sight, at least for some experts and for the Seattle-based Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Eliminating the disease is one of the most ambitious projects the world’s largest philanthropy has undertaken.

With more than $2 billion committed, the foundation is the leading private supporter of research into new treatments, vaccines, diagnostic tools, disease mapping and other weapons to fight malaria.

This research should help the foundation press the global community for a renewed attack that could begin about 2020, putting to use new drugs now in the pipeline.

As long as the drug-resistant strain spreading in the forests of Myanmar can be contained, that is. “Myanmar is the linchpin country, really,” said Tom Kanyok, a former WHO scientist and now the foundation’s senior malaria program officer for the Greater Mekong region.

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