Evaluating The Treatment Of Resistant Treponema Pallidum Using Malariotherapy And Penicillin
Malariotherapy was first documented as an experimental clinical trial in the treatment of
neurosyphilis during the early 1940s by Julius Wagner-Jauregg, one of three known
psychiatrists to have won the Nobel Prize. Due to the emergence of bioethics, discovery of
penicillin as an antibiotic alternative for the curation of syphilis and the fall from grace of
Wagner-Jauregg, malarial therapy was side-lined and phased out. However as a result of the
emergence of antibiotic resistance in syphilis patients to their drugs, we decided to undertake
this study to determine the success margins that malarial therapy would have over penicillin
use for curation of syphilis. A random sampling of 120 subjects from 5 different areas in
Kenya, of both male and female genders and indiscriminately of ethnicity, was conducted in
psychiatric institutions. The study looked to observe the cerebrospinal fluid(CSF) values and
serum rapid plasma reagin titers of the selected participants, monitoring their baseline
abnormalities over a 6 weeks’ period of grouped treatment. The results yielded provided for
analytical assessment which showed no statistically significant differences in the medians of
the successes for both malariotherapy and penicillin g treatment. We concluded that despite
the insignificance in median differences for the success rates, malariotherapy had more
successes and would provide a cheaper option for syphilis treatment. We recommended
further research into this area, with heavy emphasis on a larger sample size and prolonged
research period.