No viruses in this one but it’s still fun. In the spirit of the enemy of my enemy, there was once a time when MALARIA was a dangerous friend worth having in the fight against a deadlier pathogen: SYPHILIS. Like Godzilla vs Mothra, doctors would infect patients dying...
...from syphilis w/ malaria to cause them to spike a raging fever. Syphilis is a really nasty bacteria that for millennia was considered incurable, though patients could recover if their had a high enough fever... esp on Saturdays.
Malaria was hardly a walk in the park & one might not consider trading malaria for syphilis to be medically ethical, except that there was a drug, quinine, for malaria. So idea was to cure syphilis w/ malaria & cure malaria w/ quinine. Fun fact: quinine glows in black light:
Quinine comes from bark of a special tree that was known to help treat malaria for centuries; quinine itself was purified from the bark in early 1800. It took an Austrian psychiatrist in 1917 to connect the dots to come up w/ “malariotherapy” for syphilis.
Syphilis is an STD, so why a psychiatrist? B/c although infection shows up initially as lesion on genitals or cervix (sometimes also a rash elsewhere on body), it goes quiet for years, decades even, & then can reawaken in the brain (don’t look below). So called “neurosyphilis”...
...would sometimes have psychiatric symptoms, such as mania or dementia, making it logical that a psychiatrist would give thought to use it to induce fever to treat syphilis. Julius Wagner-Jauregg’s discovery of malariatherapy in 1917 won him Nobel Prize for it in 1927.
In 1943, penicillin was approved and was a way better cure, so we don’t need Godzilla anymore. That’s good because malariotherapy killed 15% of patients... kind of like Godzilla destroys at least 15% of any city it saves.
Of course, there are antibiotic-resistant strains of syphilis on the rise at a time when Congress is talking up price controls on biomedical innovation, making it even harder than before to justify investing in antibiotic companies. Oh well... at least we have malaria.
Share this Scrolly Tale with your friends.
A Scrolly Tale is a new way to read Twitter threads with a more visually immersive experience.
Discover more beautiful Scrolly Tales like this.