Question

In an anti-malaria compaign in a certain area,
Quinine was administered to 812 persons out of
a total population of 3,240. The number of fever
cases is as below:
Treatment
Fever
No Fever
Quinine
20
792
No. Quinine
220
2,216
Discusss the usefulness of Quinine in checking
malaria​

Answer 1

Answer:

Malaria sickens and kills people through several pathological mechanisms, understood to varying degrees. In addition to first- and second-line antimalarial drug treatments, adjunctive and supportive care measures (e.g., intravenous fluids, blood transfusions, supplemental oxygen, antiseizure medications) may be needed for severe manifestations. The aims of treatment are to prevent death or long-term deficits from malaria, to cut short the morbidity of an acute episode of illness, and to clear the infection entirely so that it does not recur.

Fever, sweating, and chills (or, in some cases, merely fever) triggered by the release of plasmodia into the bloodstream from mature blood schizonts, are the most common symptoms heralding the onset of a clinical case of uncomplicated falciparum malaria (see Chapter 6 for a description of the evolution of clinical symptoms). Without treatment—or an active immune response primed by repeated previous malaria infections—the number of parasites will increase with every 2-day cycle of reproduction. A mature infection may involve up to 1012 circulating plasmodia.

At any time after the infection is established, the vast majority of plasmodia will be in some stage of asexual maturation leading to another round of multiplication within the patient's bloodstream. However, a few parasites will have transformed into sexual stages (gametocytes) that, once ingested by mosquitoes, can perpetuate the transmission cycle. Because each stage of the malarial life cycle exhibits distinct biochemical and other characteristics (i.e., it expresses different proteins or locates in different sites within the body), a drug may kill one stage but have little effect on another. In other words, in each life-cycle stage the parasite manifests unique biological properties that can offer a target for the action of one or more antimalarial drugs.