Malaria
So I mentioned the word malaria in a recent post about AIDS:
Most of what I write about malaria is not me suggesting what might help treat it but me talking about what I know about how it gets treated and its history. I know something about the topic because my dad had malaria in his youth -- lost all his hair to the high fever from it -- and because it has a genetic disorder associated with it: Sickle Cell Anemia exists because it is protective against malaria.
So some stuff I know about malaria:
So they would send you to the mountains to get you away from "the bad air." And I used to think that mostly PREVENTED malaria by avoiding mosquitoes but now I think it likely ALSO treated malaria.
If you had a house up in the mountains and worked in the lowlands and traveled regularly between these two places at two different altitudes, it likely created a firestorm in your blood on a regular basis and helped keep the infection down to a dull roar even if you did nothing else about it.
If you have had covid, you are PROBABLY zinc deficient. Covid is basically a blood disorder more than a respiratory issue. I have reason to believe that zinc deficiency generally makes your red blood cells more vulnerable and resolving your zinc deficiency may help you treat your anemia without making iron-loving bugs like PA (or trypanosomas or malaria) worse.If you search the site for the word "malaria," several posts come up. The above paragraph is notable for being the first time I suggested a possible treatment modality for malaria.
Most of what I write about malaria is not me suggesting what might help treat it but me talking about what I know about how it gets treated and its history. I know something about the topic because my dad had malaria in his youth -- lost all his hair to the high fever from it -- and because it has a genetic disorder associated with it: Sickle Cell Anemia exists because it is protective against malaria.
So some stuff I know about malaria:
- Malaria is developing resistance to synthetic drugs based on quinine but not to quinine itself. If the synthetic drugs FAIL, prescribe ACTUAL quinine.
- Like trypanosomas and PA, it feeds on red blood cells. I'm reasonably confident that a good guess is zinc supplementation following covid would be a good thing, BUT to be sure you could take a medical history, ask if they had covid, see if malaria got WORSE after covid. If yes, supplement zinc and see if that helps.
- Like trypanosomas, it's a parasite with a somewhat complex life cycle and also lives in other things (mosquitoes) and that's primarily how it gets caught and it makes it tough to eradicate. A lot of what I have done to treat trypanosomas has been inspired by or informed by a long history of reading up on malaria, so you could potentially borrow from things I've written about trypanosomas to develop treatments for malaria.
- I'm somewhat confident that creating a firestorm in your blood would be something that would work. Historically, a recommendation for dealing with malaria was "stay out of the swamps -- go build your house in the mountains" and so I think likely altitude does similar things to malaria that it does to trypanosomas.
So they would send you to the mountains to get you away from "the bad air." And I used to think that mostly PREVENTED malaria by avoiding mosquitoes but now I think it likely ALSO treated malaria.
If you had a house up in the mountains and worked in the lowlands and traveled regularly between these two places at two different altitudes, it likely created a firestorm in your blood on a regular basis and helped keep the infection down to a dull roar even if you did nothing else about it.
