We haven't beaten malaria. The parasite is too well evolved, too wily. Surviving an infection only gives a few months of immunity (although initial infections are more likely to affect the brain), and anti-malarial drugs have severe side effects. The best prevention is to reduce the transmissibility through economic development But there's a feedback loop in effect - malaria weakens people, sapping their ability to improve their economic status, leaving them in the sort of living conditions that both aid in the transmission of malaria and create a reservoir for the disease.
The Malaria Project starts with an outline of the disease. There are four human strains, but two are most important, cyclical vivid and the more virulent falciparum. This old world disease had a new world treatment, quinine, from the bark of the South American chinch tree. It only saved the patient, though, it did not kill the parasite and left the victim subject to recurrent attacks and left them able to transmit the disease to a neighbor.
19th Century chemistry tried to synthesize quinine from coal tar and failed. One failure, by William Henry Perkin, created the first artificial dye and kicked off the organic chemistry industry. Germany led the way, and after WWI, her patents were confiscated by US companies. WWI also broke down the late 19th Century gains against the parasite. More troops were infected with malaria than died, and Mediterranean regions which had controlled transmission once found the disease to be endemic.
Malaria had never ceased to be endemic in the American South, and that's where Dr; Lowell Coggshall first joined the fight. A formerly indifferent student who saw college as an escape from subsistence farming in Iowa, he worked for the Rockefeller Institute, measuring parasite loads in children and adults and pouring toxic Paris Green on stagnant ponds to kill mosquito larvae. Along with experienced malariologists Samuel Darling and Paul Russell, he made headway but malaria wasn't truly controlled until the TVA brought electricity, running water, and jobs to the area.
While Coggshell was fighting malaria win the US, a German doctor, Julius Wagner-Jauregg, found that the high fever caused by malaria could cure tertiary syphilis (in about 30% of early cases). Many patients died, but since tertiary syphilis is terminal, scientists father day did not see an ethical problem. Jauregg eventually won a Nobel Prize and researchers - both German (where the Nazi regime preferred human over non-human experiments) and American - used mental patients and prisoners as both research subjects and reservoirs for the malaria parasite.
When WWII broke out, malaria control because a war weapon. Again, more soldiers developed malaria than were injured and the available drugs (made from incomplete German patents) were so toxic that soldiers refused to take them. Coggshell, now a Naval officer, devised control methods (screens, repellant, long pants and sleeves, clearing and poisoning stagnant water) executed by enlisted men chosen for their scientific backgrounds. Once control methods were established (if not always followed), Cogwheel turned to testing treatments on soldiers sent home to recover.
US researchers, notably Alf Alving, continued to experiment on prisoners as well, They were better treated than other prisoners, and gave consent, but such consent can't be considered informed or voluntary. Perhaps that's why the first Nazi doctor to stand trial, Claus Schilling, was executed while later doctors were condemned to life imprisonment during the Nuremberg Trials. Alving's work, along with Coggshell's, did lead to effective treatments, but at what cost? Although they passed muster in the day, we cannot argue that they were ethical. But can we refuse the life-saving advances he made?
In the end, it may not matter. Malaria is smarter than we are, and no matter how toxic, the drugs eventually become useless against resistant strains. Multi-drug therapy helps stave that off, but only temporarily Our best bet is to stop transmission, which can only come with economic development, which is hindered by endemic malaria.
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