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The Malariatherapy of Neurosyphilis

1984; American Society of Parasitologists; Volume: 70; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/3281739

1937-2345

Eli Chernin,

Syphilis Diagnosis and Treatment

Medicine offers few examples of a living pathogen that is therapeutic in a disease caused by another. Nevertheless, the malaria parasites, some scourges themselves, were used for about 40 years to ameliorate or reverse the ravages of neurosyphilis, a life-threatening advanced phase of syphilis. Furthermore, in using malariatherapy invaluable information was gained-as it might not otherwise have been gained-about the biology of malaria, its treatment, and its mosquito transmission. Truncated versions of the origins and uses of malariatherapy appear in the introductions to older papers and books, and more extensively in a now-rare monograph by Kupper (1939), in an excellent clinically oriented book by Moore (1941), and in an informative chapter by Becker (1949). The advent of penicillin in the mid1940's ineluctably signalled the end of malariatherapy for syphilis, but, as suggested by the title of an editorial on that subject (Anon., 1975), the 'final curtain' did not come down on malariatherapy in Britain until the 1970's, and combined therapy with penicillin and malaria, once common in the United States (Crawford, 1948; Becker, 1949), ceased in the mid1960's. I plan to describe in short compass the problem of general paralysis, the manner and effects of malariatherapy, and the knowledge gained for malariology. Only one or two generations ago syphilis and malaria were important to each other, but to this day the biological interactions between the two organisms remain largely unexplained.