Gene/Protein Disease Symptom Drug Enzyme Compound
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Query: UMLS:C0024530 (malaria)
 44,886 document(s) hit in 31,850,051 MEDLINE articles (0.00 seconds)

The apicomplexan parasite Plasmodium gallinaceum has not been much studied from the veterinary standpoint. Although it causes malaria in domesticated chickens, no effective drugs appear to be commercially available. A mixture of trimethoprim and sulphaquinoxaline (TMP/SQX, ratio 1:3), with a wide spectrum of activity against bacteria and coccidia, is here shown to be also efficacious against blood-induced P. gallinaceum malaria when administered therapeutically in the feed of chickens for 5-day periods, beginning on the day before infection, or on the day of infection, or up to four days after infection. Chickens were protected against mortality and reduction of weight gain. Three other criteria of efficacy, which showed good correlation with each other and also with the two commercial performance criteria, were the production of green diarrhoea (due to biliverdin), parasitaemia and reduced haematocrit values. When TMP/SQX treatments were initiated sooner than five days after infection, parasites were almost entirely eliminated from the blood, whereas treatments initiated later than four days after infection failed to protect birds against clinical disease. Birds protected by TMP/SQX against primary infection with P. gallinaceum were immune to clinical malaria when exposed to a severe blood-induced challenge of P. gallinaceum 28 days later.
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PMID:The efficacy of a mixture of trimethoprim and sulphaquinoxaline against Plasmodium gallinaceum malaria in the domesticated fowl Gallus gallus. 1584 74

Sulfaquinoxaline played an important part in the demotion of roast chicken from vaunted Sunday-dinner status to an unrespected position on the everyday menu of the Western world. It had its origins in the chemical synthetic program that sprang from the introduction of sulfonamide drugs into human medicine in the 1930s. The program was sustained through the years of World War II despite declining clinical use of that chemical class. Several sulfa drugs were known to be active against the sporozoan parasite (Plasmodium spp.) that causes malaria, but were not satisfactory in clinical practice. A sulfonamide that had a long plasma half-life would ipso facto be considered promising as an antimalarial drug. Sulfaquinoxaline, synthesized during the war, was such a compound. It proved too toxic to be used in human malaria, but was found to be a superior agent against another sporozoan parasite, Eimeria spp., the causative agent of coccidiosis in domestic chickens. In 1948 sulfaquinoxaline was introduced commercially as a poultry coccidiostat. It was not the first sulfonamide found active against Eimeria spp. in poultry, but its practical success in disease control firmly established the routine incorporation of anticoccidial drugs in poultry feed. In this way, the drug exerted a major impact on the worldwide production of poultry meat. Although it has long been eclipsed by other drugs in poultry management, it continues to be used in other host species. This article describes the discovery of sulfaquinoxaline as a practical therapeutic agent, and examines the way in which the discovery arose from a partnership between industry and academia.
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PMID:History of the discovery of sulfaquinoxaline as a coccidiostat. 1883 73