Who invented malaria drugs

During the First World War , Ross was appointed a consultant physician on tropical diseases to Indian troops and was sent to Alexandria for four months to investigate an outbreak of dysentery that was hampering troops in the Dardanelles.

In he was appointed a consultant physician to the War Office and in he received an honorary post as consultant to the Ministry of Pensions. The main focus of the Institute was the study of the nature and treatment, propagation, and prevention of tropical diseases.

Ross assumed the post of Director in Chief, which he held until his death in Sir Ronald Ross, Mrs. Ross, Mahomed Bux and laboratory assistants at the laboratory in Calcutta where the life history of the malaria parasite in birds was fully worked out in Ross wrote extensively on malaria including his book The Prevention of Malaria in and on other topics including mathematics.

Oocysts stages of malaria parasites developing in the walls of a mosquito midgut stomach. Such oocysts were seen, for the first time, by Sir Ronald Ross on 20 August In , Ross advertised his papers for sale in Science Progress ,making it known that he needed the money for the provision of his wife and family. While Ross is remembered for his malaria work, this remarkable man was also a mathematician, epidemiologist, sanitarian, editor, novelist, dramatist, poet, amateur musician, composer, and artist.

But it is far from the only time a modern cure has been found from traditional Chinese medicine and it is unlikely to be the last. Tu and her colleagues searched ancient Chinese medical texts for references to herbs and recipes that might have been used to fight malaria-type symptoms such as fever, rigors and headache. They systematically screened the well-documented texts and sifted through more than 2, herb preparations of traditional Chinese herbs and from these identified herb extracts and tested them on mice being infected by malaria parasites.

One of these, the common Chinese plant sweet wormwood Artemesia annua was prescribed in a 4th century Jin dynasty text, for treating fevers — a key malaria symptom. When tested, it was found to reduce the number of malaria parasites in the blood. They tested these chemicals one by one against mice infected by malaria parasites until they identified a compound that at a very low dose can kill the parasites faster than other anti-malarial drugs.

This compound, artemisinin, can uniquely produce chemically reactive molecules in the parasite that kills them. Isolating different classes of chemicals in plants requires strategy and patience. And producing a pure single compound such as artemisinin in a reasonable quantity from a plant with a higher potency than a synthetic drug is a major achievement.

The bark of the tree was first introduced to Europe around , where it spread from England to Spain as a popular antimalarial compound. Even when botanists finally classified the plant in the s, it was still known colloquially as the cinchona tree 8. However, the active chemical components of the cinchona plant were not isolated by chemists until By the 20th Century, the main supply of cinchona trees had shifted to plantations in the Dutch East Indies, a geographical displacement that would cause problems for America in WWII see below 8.

Racing to develop antimalarial compounds at this time, German chemists developed a drug named Resochin that would late be known as the popular pharmacologic agent chloroquine 8. As previously noted, the major source of cinchona trees had moved to the Dutch East Indies by the early 20th century. With the expansion of the Japanese Empire during WWII, Americans suffered from a lack of antimalarial drugs while fighting in the South Pacific, a region in which the disease was a major threat To combat this shortage, a campaign to collect quinine supplies scattered around the United States began in This period was also notable for the emergency-prompted bolstering of research on antimalarial compounds.

Spurred by government support and a sense of national crisis during the war, many advances were made in the biological, chemical, and immunological understanding of the disease as well as methods to treat it, Among the discoveries from this period were alkaloid compounds, including the hydrangea extract febrifuge which unfortunately proved far too toxic in clinical trials to be used as a treatment.

Another was the identification of the insecticidal properties of DDT a compound first synthesized in in by Paul Muller, a contribution for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine During its expansion into Cuba and the construction of the Panama Canal, the US Government took an active interest in controlling malaria outbreaks. On July 1st, , the Center for Communicable Diseases was formed. This center, which would eventually become the modern CDC, dedicated itself to the eradication of malaria in the US, a goal that was accomplished by Among the strategies used in this campaign were improved drainage to remove mosquito breeding sites and large-scale insecticide spraying over affected areas Malaria prevalence overlaps the habitats of the Anopheles mosquitoes, shown in the boxed diagram 16,1.

However, as you can see, these insects are found around the globe, while incidents of malaria are concentrated in the tropics. Even if more Anopheles are found in the tropics, due to their faster development in temperate water, this still does not fully explain historical accounts in which malaria is reported in some regions earlier in more ancient time than others.

These differences might be explained if the disease arose in one particular place — the current theory is that Africa was the continent of origin 6. After this beginning, malaria spread, the parasites either flourishing or declining based on the new climate 6. For example, Native Americans may have been rendered malaria-free by their migration to North America during the ice age, entering a zone unfavorable to the life cycle of the mosquito vector 6, More recent historical events that may have spread the parasites include the African slave trade of the 16th through 18th centuries and foreign travelers in ancient Greece 6.

While this paradigm of environmental adaptation is plausible, factors outside the world of scientific theory may also help explain the geographical distribution of malaria; in fact, economics may play a pivotal role.