Atebrin And

ME!

Some Experiences of This Substitute for Quinine

By Judy Tudor

ATEBRIN —now apparently spelt Ate brln-e —has had much publicity, since it has been announced that United Nations scientists, after twelve months’ research, have improved this substitute for quinine. Quinine, as all malaria sufferers know, disappeared from the market when the Japs occupied Java early in 1942.

Most residents of the South Pacific Territories were introduced to Atcbrin (without the “e”) about the mid-thirties, when the German firm of Bayer began exporting it; and, after the local medicos had tried it out on kanakas and a few unsuspecting Chinese, some went to the length of taking it.

It remained, nevertheless, one of those controversial subjects that are good for an argument at any time. It was held by some to be the cause of fits, blindness and heart disease —and hailed by others to be the panacea of all malarial ills. My own experiences in New Guinea with the sulphur-yellow drug—for what they are worth —are as follows: — I SUFFERED low fever for about eight months non-stop—or until people gave me one look and went off mut tering “blackwater.” The daily five-grain dose of quinine seemed to aggravate the situation rather than relieve it; and, when it was increased to ten grains per day, I turned into a palsied wreck.

Someone suggested, doubtfully, Atebrin; and a runner was sent off on the 100miles trek to the township where there was, newly installed, a doctor.

In due course, the boy returned with the tiny bottle containing 15 yellow tab lets, and a page of instructions from the doctor, which left no doubt in my mind that he considered it to be no better than bottled dynamite.

At this time. I was alone, and I waited two weeks, until the men returned, before I ventured to take the drug, for fear of some of the “toxic conditions” which the doctor had mentioned. I then commenced to take the tablets—three a day for five days—but never without mentally bracing myself each time for any possible con vulsion or heart attack.

As the last of the tablets went, so did the fever. It remained away for pre cisely three weeks.

By this time, I was an Atebrin convert; but, having heard that the doctor would on no account send me a second course so soon after the first, I persuaded a pass ing miner to part with a bottle which he was carrying, apparently, as a magical charm.

Course II was a failure, and I was shoved off “South.” Salamaua’s doctor, appealed to for a cure en route, shook his head over Atebrin, and explained that the only two persons to whom he had administered it, had each taken a fit.

RETURNING, via Rabaul, I had an other attack of fever, and I applied to a Rabaul doctor for relief.

“There is nothing like Atebrin,” he said, in effect. “You can take it every day and it will never harm you. I’ll come down to the ship to-morrow and give you an injection.”

He came, armed with a large hypo dermic syringe. “I’m giving you half a course in one injection,” he said. “It will probably make you feel drunk.”

I was not particularly enthusiastic about that; but, as he plunged the instru

ment into my arm, he added, somewhat pensively: “I’ve just given a big dose to a patient—she had a convulsion!”

“Good Lord!” I babbled. “What on earth are you doing this to me for?”

“Oh, you’ll be all right,” he said, airily.

“She was very low.”

“Well, I feel low,” I said frantically.

“Don’t go off until we see how this works in me.”

But he packed up and went; and, after twenty minutes of prone lying and careful breathing, I got off the bunk and stood on my feet. To my amazement I did not convulse —I did not even feel drunk.

I was re-converted to Atebrin. On my trip up the coast I bought the drug wher ever I could find it, and went into the bush well equipped.

Thereafter, following my own line of reasoning, peculiar to no medical science, I took half a tablet a day, and as time wore on I became, in colour, jaundiced Malay, but of other ill-effects there ap peared to be none. I suffered about the same amount of fever as anyone else, but no more.

CAME Christmas —and over the moun tains we went for the celebrations.

Accompanied by a “monkey,” I started off two hours before the men; and reached the village “on top” about ten minutes before them. The interven ing time was spent, by me, in having an agonising experience, which would have tried the patience of a Spartan Boy—and by the monkey—mostly—in sitting stoically on a log, nonchalantly picking off leeches,

or engaged on some other native pastime, while his missus lay down in the mud and gasped for breath. The track a young nvuiet of mud rose a couple of thousand feet in the first few miles, and as it wound upwards, I panted and gasped, and my heart beat louder and louder until the noise of it took possession of me and seemed to beat around me like some

yibratmg aura.

Like Brer Rabbit, I said nuffm, when I was discovered by the rest of the party, stretched out under the village coconuts, mottled-purple in the face, mud-bespattered and flanked by a couple of green

coconuts with which the ancient Luluai had revived me.

But I thought much as I continued the journey, and in the days that followed Thenceforth, I took my drugs when needed-as most Islands people do-and when I next came to tackle mountains my heart appeared to have returned to the right spot in my body, and not to be suspended by a string just outside my ears.

TT comes as a shock to realise that in 1 spite of the giant strides that medical science has made in the last half

century, there are over 800 million malaria sufferers in the world to-day—and that there is no sure-fire cure for it.

Now, of course, drugs for the treat ment of malaria are weapons of war— more casualties are suffered through malaria in Burma and New Guinea than through battle. Malaria, and lack of drugs to combat it, were a deciding factor in the American surrender of the Philip pines. The danger of malaria, as suf ferers know, lies not so much in its mortality rate as in the state of morbid and chronic despondency and weakness to which it reduces them.

War is an all-round speeding-up pro cess—and perhaps out of this one, now that the need is so great, a definite cure for one of man’s greatest scourges may be born.