THE STORY OF CHLOROQUINE IN MALARIA

     Malaria is an ancient foe. A real killer - it kills more patients than AIDS does. The story of rise and fall of Malaria has closely followed human greed - more attacks and deaths during war and less during peace times. It has also paralleled the human behaviour and civic sense - poor civic sense has always been an permanent invitation to Malaria. And poor civic sense does not necessarily go and in hand with poverty. Builders are a case in point - they hire  poor labourers always harboring the parasites and water left (open)  for curing make a deadly combination and help in sustaining and spreading malaria. 

     Around the second world war, there was rapid spread of malaria. An urgent need was felt to discover new and effective and safe drugs safer than then available Quinine which produced deafness on long term use. Research in  the Veterans Armed Forces Hospital yielded 3 new drugs - Chloroquine, Mefloquine and Amodiaquine of which Chlorquine was the best tolerated. Naturally it started becoming popular. This was a German discovery by a pharmaceutical company Bayer and Hitler got wind of it. He realised the potential and banned the drug from reaching the Allies - the French, Americans and the British to prove German supremacy.  He is even believed to have dropped planeloads of mosquitos  possibly infested ( contaning malarial parasites)  on the allied nations so that he can win the war at least by default (by spreading malaria and making chloroquine unavilable). Needless to say this foolish idea perished with the defeat of Germany. America took this very seriously and in an unusual move, nationalised all holdings of the German pharmaceutical company responsible for the discovery of Chloroquine and auctioned all their land holdings which was bought by Ames a company then making dipsticks thereby demonstrating American supremacy.  The Bayer company rightly protested and  got rights of continuation of sales in USA through local companies like Glaxo and Roche. 

    Bayer scientists worked hard and discovered some winner molecules which included Ciprofloxacin and Nifedipine among others These were global hits and the Bayer company bought  every inch of the land  back and continued to make dipsticks and embossed Bayer on top of Ames to affirm American supremacy. Much later, after many years of use and misuse, we started finding chloroquine resistance , the other drugs - Mefloquine and Amodiaquine were brought out giving an impression that these are new drugs. However, Artisunates were introduced later in the treatment of Malaria which are still useful. Before you go with an idea that these are newest drugs, I will tell you that these were in use in ancient China as Quingashu and was extensively used in the treatment of Malaria. 

     This brings us to the lesson for the day - it is more important to live better by respecting nature and rediscovering our lost civic sense. We cannot control Malaria without helping nature to control it. We cannot declare war on the nature with senseless deforestation and greedy builders  constructing new buildings without proper antimalarial measures. I only hope we change for the better and work towards reducing the incidence of Malaria than trying to discover new drugs which is next to impossible!