According to the World Health Organization, malaria is responsible for approximately 445,000 deaths every year. That number may be due to drop, however, as scientists have found that a human-safe blue dye kills parasites in patients' bloodstreams within two days – that's faster than has ever been possible before.
...
That's where the methylene blue dye comes in.In field tests conducted in Mali, it was added to artemisinin-based medication, and was found to eradicate all gametocytes in patients' bloodstreams within as little as 48 hours. The dye is typically used in laboratories to distinguish dead cells from living cells, and was reportedly well-tolerated by the test subjects. It does, however, have one interesting side effect.
According to the lead scientist it turns your urine blue, which is reason enough for anybody to take it, really.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday February 09 2018, @03:29AM (4 children)
Tonic water? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quinine [wikipedia.org]
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by c0lo on Friday February 09 2018, @04:20AM (2 children)
Nope, it's methylene blue [wikipedia.org].
Intense dark blue coloured even in visible light.
Mild antioxidant, reduces ferric (Fe3+) ion to ferrous (Fe2+) one, used in treating symptoms of Methemoglobinemia [wikipedia.org]
The malaria parasite seems to rely on Fe2+->Fe3+ for its metabolism (see quicktest for malaria [nature.com] using magnets [physicsworld.com]) and the presence of methylene blue interferes with its metabolism.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 09 2018, @05:26AM
A little off-topic but methylene blue has some other interesting properties: its an oxygen sensor [americanchemistry.com].
I have long suspected the blue fluid used to detect automotive head-gasket leaks to the radiator by bubbling any gases coming from the radiator through a solution will turn it from blue to yellow if CO and CO2 exhaust gases are being vented to the coolant - is methylene blue.
It seems to be a commonly available product. Quite useful in raising tropical fish. [google.com]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 09 2018, @04:42PM
From the linked Wikipedia article:
Doesn't sound exactly like a new discovery.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday February 09 2018, @06:50AM
Aspirine from willow tree bark was far cheaper, and relieved the symptoms of Malaria just as well as Quinine did.
But Quinine cures malaria. Aspirine only eases the symptoms.
Without a doubt millions perished as a result of that profound biomedical insight.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 09 2018, @03:31AM (10 children)
Without a patent, nobody will bother to pay for FDA drug trials. Grrrr...
I also have to wonder what this does to your eyes. That is a damn strong blue dye. I could see people getting some kind of non-standard colorblindness.
Another side effect might be erroneous readings of blood oxygen level. If your blood is blue... you need oxygen ASAP.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Immerman on Friday February 09 2018, @04:05AM
If it turns your urine blue, then I would assume your kidneys do a pretty good job of flushing it out of your bloodstream fairly quickly. Seems like a few days of unreliable tests would be a small price to pay for a fast, cheap (I assume?) malaria cure.
Also, turns out it's already used as a medication for several other conditions - including impaired blood oxygen transport efficiency - so presumably they know how to compensate for its presence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methylene_blue [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 3, Informative) by sjames on Friday February 09 2018, @04:10AM (4 children)
Methylene Blue is already used as a prescription drug in both oral and injected form. It is also frequently used as a prank due to the blue pee side effect.
It's a great discovery since it is quite cheap and the places where Malaria is a problem aren't under FDA jurisdiction.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday February 09 2018, @02:14PM (3 children)
Thats kinda the problem. wikipedia reports $191.40 for a 50 mg dose. I didn't exactly call Walgreens to verify, but, sounds believable.
Carolina Biological sells half a liter of 0.1% for ten bucks for microscope slides, so figure a mL is a gram so 500 mL = 500 g = half a gram aka 500 mg per bottle so microscope slide grade is about $1 per non-human rated dose.
Now personally I wouldn't eat most of the stuff Carolina Biological sells, but think about it for a second, if the microscope slide stain was full of human poop or pathogens it would contaminate the hell out of the slides you're trying to run lab tests upon... its legally not pharma grade, but practically and technologically its probably cleaner than your supermarket produce aisle.
I guess one way to phrase it is a dose costs $1 to manufacture, ship, and deliver, but the markup for malpractice and corruption is about $190.40 in the USA.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 09 2018, @04:47PM (1 child)
It surely has nothing structured in it (as that would, as you say, make problems in the microscope images). But what about solvents that are less than healthy?
(Score: 2) by VLM on Saturday February 10 2018, @04:36PM
There are impurities that screw up your experiments such that you can "choose your poison" and purchase ethanol that's tested and assayed for biological purity to a level far beyond consumer booze labeled as non-denatured molecular biology grade ethanol thats absolutely DNA-free
OR
you can buy ethanol for organic chemistry foolishness thats been tested and assayed for solvent purity to a level far beyond consumer booze labeled as non-denatured spectrographically pure grade thats proven to have less than a part per billion or whatever of competing solvents (so you don't accidentally methylate a methanol molecule for for ochem experiment or whatever)
I assume you can buy rotgut thats not terribly pure or merely good enough for shellac manufacture. That would be something to avoid! Yet its also easy from an engineering perspective to buy safe to consume stuff.
A good fraction of a century ago I can personally assure you that even back then chemistry supply companies were wise to underage drinkers and refused to ship un-denatured pure "ethyl hydroxl" or WTF smartass analogy to kids.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by sjames on Friday February 09 2018, @05:39PM
That's not a regulatory markup, it's a fuck you because we can markup. Otherwise, how could other drugs with the same regulatory and malpractice hazards possible sell for less that that $191?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by MadTinfoilHatter on Friday February 09 2018, @08:22AM (2 children)
Apparently it can turn the whites of your eyes blueish. The effect wears away as the substance is washed out of your system, though, and it doesn't seem to affect vision even temporarily.
(Score: 3, Funny) by lx on Friday February 09 2018, @01:23PM (1 child)
Perfect for Dune cosplay.
Last one in Ollantaytambo gets their heart-plug pulled!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 09 2018, @05:21PM
I was hoping we'd be able to sell them blue meth. I like your idea better.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Friday February 09 2018, @01:57PM
On the other side, it seems like over the course of my life, all the "cool' microscope stains have been found to cause cancer, but good old methylene blue is still somehow "safe".
I honestly don't remember from quantitative chemical analysis class a quarter century ago, if we used it as a chemistry indicator for some obscure titrations. I think it would work.
A long time ago when kids toy microscopes came with methylene blue to stain your own homemade glass slides, it did a great job of permanently staining your fingers and clothes. I'm somewhat curious if the "temporary tattoo" people use it.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 09 2018, @04:17AM (3 children)
Since the malaria parasite is transmitted by mosquitoes, wouldn't it make the most sense to use the blue dye on every last little puddle where they breed? A blue earth policy (instead of scorched earth).
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Friday February 09 2018, @10:18AM (1 child)
Considering the sideffects it might have on other life the blue colour* might end up being a tad bit more permanent than just dosing humans**
However, since it seems that humans are the preferred (only? the langauge is vague in the articles I find) host for malaria in one of its stages it seems easier to just dose enough humans rather than finding every single bit on standing water (you know that old jar lid that seems to always have water in it in the shed...)
* = blue is the "desert colour" of water
** = in countries with poor sanitation the stuff will reach waterstreams anyways, so we might end up running that test accidently anyways.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday February 09 2018, @06:27PM
I'm rather certain that humans aren't either the preferred or only host for malaria (in any of its stages), but given their number and size of people they're probably the most common one. Not quite the same thing.
I'd be quite cautious about indiscriminately dousing the landscape with methylene blue, but it's certainly been used for human consumption for a very long time. I expect that as soon as it was discovered it was used for a practical joke that involved people consuming it. So while it may, over time, have bad effects on humans, a short course shouldn't pose any problems. (As has been pointed out, it's already used as a medicine...and several people in my organic chem class reported on it's use in practical jokes. In fact, I think my wife reported on using it as a food dye when she was a kid...and neither she nor the folks in my chem class would have had access to pharmaceutical grade.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Friday February 09 2018, @02:06PM
Figure human blood supply five liters and a billion humans in Africa so you gotta treat 5 billion liters of blood in Africa. Lets say, annually or whatever, at least until the parasite breeds resistance (next year?)
There's a thousand liters in a cubic meter and Google says just the Congo river alone drains forty thousand cubic meters per second which would be forty million liters a second, close enough to fifty million liters per second not to matter for the sake of argument. So treating about a hundred seconds of water flow of one (admittedly large) river would treat all the humans. Yup you got a scaling problem. Could be overcome, but it isn't going to be easy. Not to mention the distribution problem, no functioning governments over there means we can't distribute "mere" food water and med supplies, so ...
(Score: 3, Funny) by bob_super on Friday February 09 2018, @04:27AM
Does the malaria treatment require white pants, a big nose, and being chased around by an angry guy and his cat?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 09 2018, @05:20AM (7 children)
I know it would stop Human suffering, but Machiavellian in me says this will lead to hell of a lot more Human suffering. If you stop Malaria, you can add 3 billion to your 2100 population predictions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 09 2018, @05:29AM (1 child)
You're confusing Machiavelli for a dumb shit. Places with malaria have much higher population growth than places without.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 09 2018, @12:11PM
So make that 6 billion extra. .
(Score: 4, Informative) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday February 09 2018, @05:49AM (1 child)
You're also confusing Machiavelli with Malthus...
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Saturday February 10 2018, @11:58PM
He was so funny in The Odd Couple!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 09 2018, @07:23AM (1 child)
That said, education and availability of contraception might be helpful in attaining decent happiness:contentment:suffering ratios.
I've seen people complain about UNICEF etc, and asking why there are always people starving etc despite donations etc. But it's like regularly giving food to stray animals in an area with insufficient food. They'll reproduce and then you'll have to supply even more food to postpone the inevitable and bigger population collapse.
So to me it's fine to merely give food if it's an temporary disaster etc. But if the place just can't support that many people then they should leave.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 09 2018, @08:37AM
But if they leave, they are coming to some other place, and experience shows that at the other place they are usually not that welcome.
Unless you meant "leave" as an euphemism for "die", of course.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Aiwendil on Friday February 09 2018, @10:23AM
Actually - no, it will reduce the population estimate.
People tend to breed to the point where 1-2 offspring per couple are guaranteed survival, which means in countries with low mortality they only tend to get 1-2 children while in countries with high mortality it kinda gets out of control.
(Score: 4, Funny) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday February 09 2018, @06:47AM
and yes he's michael tiemann's brother. We were friends at Caltech.
I cannot just now recall the dye that he wanted to drink but it would have turned his eyeballs yellow-green as well as made them fluorescent.
However he performed the Ames Assay on it and so determined that it was a mutagen. While he thought it would be quite cool to hang out under blacklights, he didn't think it was quite cool enough.
Fluorescein? Something like that.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 09 2018, @08:21AM
All that is needed is
https://newatlas.com/methylene-blue-dye-malaria/53280/ [newatlas.com]
If you wanted to get fancy, you could have made it
https://newatlas.com/methylene-blue-dye-malaria/53280/#Article [newatlas.com]
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 09 2018, @08:34AM (1 child)
So you actually get blue blood from this cure?
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 09 2018, @12:15PM
Only if you have lots of money
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 09 2018, @02:44PM (1 child)
Quickly, summon Eiffel 65
I'm blue ba da be da ba, da ba dee da bu da
(Score: 2) by PinkyGigglebrain on Friday February 09 2018, @05:37PM
I've got it playing right now for the first time in years.
Thank you :)
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 09 2018, @09:58PM
Gonna give BSOD to malaria.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Saturday February 10 2018, @01:08AM
Or so I hear.
compiling...