Daniel in The Lion's Den | 928: Mosquitoes and Malaria XVIII

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928: Mosquitoes and Malaria XVIII – Quinine: Description / Usage / Facts

03 November, 2009

Malaria – prevention is better than cure, and cure is better than endure, because the treatments and the drugs are most of the time very bitter and as painful as the disease itself since they often cause very serious side-effects and complications…

Reports in green (checked and edited) / highlights in red / extra highlights and comments in brown / dangerous in orange / highly dangerous in pink / good and true in blue / and my comments in black. Kindly note that whenever Orange and Pink indicate Horse-shit and Horse-fart respectively, you will be told…

Quinine is a natural white crystalline alkaloid (cinchona bark) with anti-smallpox, analgesic or pain-killing, and anti-inflammatory properties – and a bitter taste. It is a stereoisomer of quinidine. It was the first ever effective treatment for malaria caused by P. falciparum, in therapeutics: the branch of medicine that deals with methods of treatment and healing, especially the use of drugs to treat diseases; in the 17^th century. It remained the anti-malarial drug of choice until the 1940s, when other drugs took over. Since then, many effective anti-malarial drugs have been introduced, although quinine is still used to treat the disease in certain critical situations.

Quinine is available by prescription in the USA. Quinine is also used to treat nocturnal leg-cramps and arthritis, and there have been attempts to treat prion-diseases with very limited success. Prions cause a number of diseases in a variety of mammals, like bovine spongiform encephalopathy also known as Mad-Cow-Disease in cattle and Creutzfeldt-Jakob-Disease in humans. All prion diseases affect the structure of the brain and other neural tissues, and are currently untreatable and thought to be fatal. Quinine was also a popular heroin adulterant, once.

Msn-Encarta

Prions: infectious particles of protein that, unlike viruses, contain no nucleic acid, do not trigger immune responses, and are not destroyed by extreme heat or cold. These particles are considered responsible for such diseases as scrapie, bovine spongiform encephalopathy, kuru, and…

Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease: a rare and fatal brain disease; a form of spongiform encephalopathy that develops slowly, causing dementia and loss of muscle control. A transmissible protein particle prion is the suspected cause. A new variant of the disease, which develops rapidly and affects younger people, appeared in the late 1980s.

Scrapie: a usually fatal disease affecting the nervous system of sheep and goats that is marked by intense itching and loss of muscular control. It is now thought to be one of the diseases caused by a prion, and is similar to bovine spongiform encephalopathy in cattle and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans.

Kuru: a fatal degenerative disease of the central nervous system similar to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease that affects some peoples in New Guinea. It is believed to derive from the practice of eating the brains of an ancestor – old parents

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