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Fighting an Ancient Scourge
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19930 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1992 |
2,517 Words |
| Author
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Georgia J. Persinos
Georgia J. Persinos is a pharmacognosit interested in the
discovery of medicines from plants and other natural
resources. She is currently writing a book titled From Plants
to Modern Medicine--Methods of Discovery. |
Malaria, one of mankind's oldest scourges, occurs in every part of the world except the Antarctic. Spread by a mosquito, until 20 years ago it was controlled with eradication programs and drugs. The disease now exists in 102 countries, including the United States; it infects almost 300 million people annually and kills one to two million, mostly children. Those who survive develop immunity to the disease, but during pregnancy immunity to malaria is interrupted--infected women are vulnerable to miscarriages, stillbirths, or premature births.
According to a report released by the U.S. Institute of Medicine (IOM) last October, the disease is "raging at unprecedented levels." IOM committee chairman Charles C. J. Carpenter says, "We're down to our last drugs; fewer institutions are working on drug development, and research funding for that purpose is dropping. The problem is only getting worse."
But amid all this doom and gloom is a ray of hop: qinghaosu, or arteminisin, used in China to treat malaria. The drug is now being tested in France and in the United States and could offer a new, effective treatment for this terrible disease.
Early Treatments
Through the ages, malaria has been known by many names, such as ague (from fievre ague for acute fever), swamp miasma, marsh fever, Roman fever, jungle fever, and tertian and quartan fevers. It occurred in Rome in the first century B.C. recognizing that stagnant waters produced bad air, mala aria (malaria), the Romans drained the swamps. By the fourth century it had appeared in Mesopotamia, India, and China. It is believed the Greeks picked up the disease during their travels in Asia and spread it to Italy, then a Greek colony. The Crusaders brought it back when they returned from the Middle East. By the seventeenth century, malaria was endemic in Spain, Italy, and Greece.
So rampant was malaria prior to the seventeenth century tat it killed many cardinals whenever they gathered in Rome to elect a pope. Henry VIII suffered from it for most of his life; King Charles II fell ill with the fever. He was cured with a secret remedy, called Jesuits' powder because it was brought back by Jesuit missionaries who had obtained it from South American Indians. The secret remedy was nothing more than bark of the Cinchona tree called quina quina, or "bark of barks," by the Indians. In 1639 the Jesuits introduced the powder into Italy, and it was soon being used by doctors in Spain and
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