Random factoid

[pne]

The things you learn when reading Wikipedia...

Apparently, for a while, giving someone malaria was used to treat syphilis—doctors had observed that in some patients, a high fever enabled the patient to recover from syphilis, and malaria leads to long and high fevers.

The risk was considered acceptable because malaria was treatable with quinine, which was available, while there were no effective direct cures for syphilis at the time (especially for later stages of the disease).

So I guess that if you had syphilis, they'd give you malaria, then after you'd been in fever for "long enough", they'd give you quinine to get you off malaria. Whee. Sounds like tons of fun.

Comments

[fledchen.livejournal.com]

Weird. Did they cite sources? I admit a healthy dose of skepticism when reading Wikipedia.

[rozallin.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I think I've heard of another illness that was treated in the same manner, but it escapes me. Do you suppose there are still illnesses treated in this way now?

[darth-spacey.livejournal.com]

Factoid, as might be predicted by the -oid suffix also found in terms like anthropoid or humanoid, actually means "something which has the appearance of a fact, but which is not actually factual".

Descriptively, it is starting to pick up the secondary, contradictory meaning of "a fact that is minor in importance". Prescriptively, though, it's a word that is misused perhaps more blatantly and more often in popular culture than any other. Prescriptively, you might be better using the words "trivia", "odd fact", or just "fact".

I have never claimed to be a master prescriptivist, but this one irks me somewhat, I think particularly due to the contrasting "factual" vs "counterfactual" meanings.

That aside, the trivia itself is highly interesting, and more than a little entertaining.

[pne.livejournal.com]

Well, they have a number of external links.

http://medinfo.ufl.edu/other/histmed/clancy/ is about "the History of Syphilis" which has a slide (http://medinfo.ufl.edu/other/histmed/clancy/slide66.html) which briefly mentions the malarial therapy. Supposedly, http://medinfo.ufl.edu/cgi-bin/ra.cgi?histmed/clancy.ra&47-12 is a link to an audio commentary on that slide, though I didn't listen to it to check.

http://nobelprize.org/medicine/laureates/1927/wagner-jauregg-lecture.html is a better source, though -- apparently a 1927 Nobel Lecture in which the treatment is mentioned.

[pne.livejournal.com]

I wasn't sure whether to take the statement at face value; that's part of the reason why I used the word "factoid".

Though it's true that I use the word in your sense (2) above as well (more specifically, perhaps, as "a fact that seems relatively useless" -- "(piece of) trivia" might possibly be better for that).

[pne.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't be that surprised -- medicine is not that advanced that there's an obvious chemical cure for every disease, and I'd find it quite possible that curing disease A by administering disease B (which causes the body to get rid of disease A by itself, through whatever means, and which is itself curable or at least endurable) is used in specific cases.

[it0376.livejournal.com]

Totally random, but you've disabled your @lj alias and I need to email you. So I need an alternative :B

[liv]

Conversely, in third world countries where even quinine is hard to afford, aspirin is often given to reduce the fever caused by malaria. Unfortunately, aspirin is also an anti-coagulant and therefore impedes the body's defences against the malarial parasite. But re your factoid, fever in general is caused by the body's response to infection, not by the infection itself, and the exact reason why we have evolved to do that is that parasites may survive less well at higher temperatures.

[pne.livejournal.com]

I didn't disable my @lj alias, but the address it forwarded to suddenly got misconfigured and decided to reject most of the email rather than processing and forwarding it, much to my annoyance when I checked my email this morning.

I've patched things up a little and while they're not perfect, mail to pne@livejournal.com should at least go through again for now. You can also use philip.newton@gmail.com and/or Philip.Newton@gmx.net, which are two of the addresses that the LJ email eventually used to get sent to.

Secret bunny mail is still down, unfortunately, so if you wanted to send something that relies on that, you're stuck.