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Features Departments Information |
 Stanford T. Shulman, MD, Head, Division of Infectious Diseases, collects stamps with medical themes. As a regular Feature of The Child's Doctor, Dr. Shulman provides some of his favorite stamps and a brief commentary on them. |
Stamping out malaria— STANFORD T. SHULMAN, MD aFall 1996 MALARIA CONTINUES to be one of the world's major killers of children and adults. Estimates suggest that every year 1.5 to 2.7 million people die from malaria and that 300 to 500 million people contract new infections. Historians refer to malaria as the greatest killer in all human history, and many believe that it was responsible for the decline of the Greek civilization. This stamp column is devoted to this serious disease as a reminder that malaria is seen in Chicago as well as in the developing world. In 1993, Drs. Ben Emanuel, Neil Aronson and I reported in Pediatrics 20 children with imported malaria diagnosed in Chicago, and in the summer of 1996, we treated six additional children with imported malaria from India, Zaire, Nigeria and Honduras.   Although malaria was associated with marshy areas since Hippocrates' time and was described by Thomas Sydenham around 1680, its cause was unknown until 1880 when Alphonse Laveran (1845–1922), a French army surgeon in Algeria, discovered the parasite in patients' blood. He is pictured on the blue and black Algerian stamp and on the blue Swedish stamp honoring his 1907 Nobel Prize.  The red Cuban stamp depicts the intra-erythrocytic forms of Plasmodium. Camillo Golgi (1844–1926), the famous Italian histologist, received the 1906 Nobel Prize for showing that malarial paroxysms coincide with release of parasites from red cells, for describing the life cycle of plasmodia, and for demonstrating different parasites for quartan and tertian malaria. He is honored on the dark green Swedish stamp.  
Sir Ronald Ross (1857–1932), depicted on the red Swedish stamp honoring his 1902 Nobel Prize, was a surgeon-major in the Indian Medical Service who painstakingly dissected mosquitoes and succeeded in finding the malarial parasite in the stomach of Anopheles in August 1897 and also in the female's salivary glands, ready to be injected into man. Centuries before these discoveries, the dramatic efficacy of the bark of the cinchona tree (Peruvian bark) in curing malaria was established. The exact contribution of the Countess of Chinchon, wife of the Viceroy of Peru, is unclear, but the most popular story is that she brought large amounts of the Countess' Powder back to Spain from Peru and popularized its use. The introduction of this specific therapy, say historians, was as revolutionary to the treatment of malaria as was the introduction of gunpowder to warfare, ending the purging treatment advised by Galen.   The red and blue stamp from the Congo Republic portrays the cinchona plant. The active ingredient, quinine, still in use today and recently used at Children's Memorial Hospital, was isolated in 1820 by Pelletier and Caventou, who are honored on the large red and blue French stamp.  The yellow Cuban stamp depicts the cinchona plant as well as the chemical formulae for two more modern drugs for malaria, chloroquine and primaquine.   The three stamps from Israel, Brunei and Tunisia emphasize the importance of mosquito control measures in the control of malaria. Ross, who proved the parasites to be present in the mosquito, pioneered control efforts to drain swamps, puddles and ponds. Today these efforts continue, focusing on stagnant water found in tires and other potential reservoirs. Therapeutic efforts currently emphasize the problems related to chloroquine-resistant Plasmodium falciparum infections.  |