Antibiotics

Abstract

The report by Hindle and his associates, in 1945, that penicillin exerted no effects against malaria was followed, 4 years later, by the disclosure that another antibiotic, chlortetracycline, was effective against avian and human malaria parasites (Coatney et al. 1949, Cooper et al. 1949). Reviewing the status of antibiotics up to 1952, Coatney and Greenberg pointed out that most of the 31 antibiotics tested had shown no appreciable activity against malaria parasites of birds or rodents. Penicillin, streptomycin, dihydrostreptomycin, and bacitracin were among the 22 compounds which showed no activity. Of the nine compounds which exhibited some antimalarial activity, only chlortetracycline, oxytetracycline, and chloramphenicol were considered sufficiently effective and non-toxic to be of potential therapeutic value. Although all three drugs were active against blood stages of the two avian and one rodent plasmodial species, chlortetracycline appeared to be somewhat more active than the other two compounds. The three drugs also exerted a causal prophylactic activity against sporozoite-induced infections of avian malaria. The two tetracyclines and chloramphenicol were the only antibiotics of those tested which were active against human infections with Plasmodium vivax and P. falciparum (Cooper et al. 1949; Imboden et al. 1950; Ruiz-Sanchez et al. 1951, 1952 a, b). Subsequent studies with tetracycline (Ruiz-Sanchez et al. 1956) confirmed earlier findings that clearance of fever and parasitaemia after treatment with tetracyclines was slower than that observed with other antimalarials such as chloroquine. Antibiotics were, therefore, not considered to be of practical value in the treatment of malaria infections (WHO 1961).