Quique Bassat, who has dedicated his life to fighting malaria, has his eyes shining when he looks at the first bunch of the
Cinchona officinalis
tree that arrived in Spain at the end of the 18th century from South America.
Normally, the sheet on which the leaves collected by the Colombian scientist Francisco José de Caldas for the Royal Botanical Expedition of the New Kingdom of Granada rest is exhibited in the Botanical Garden in Madrid.
But until September 22, it is “the jewel in the crown” of the
Malaria Mission exhibition: a historical look
at the capital's Museum of Natural Sciences, which brings together more than 150 objects related to the unfinished fight against the disease.
“The Countess of Chinchón lived with her husband in Peru and became ill;
She took a remedy based on
Cinchona
bark and was cured.
The tree [chinchona] was named in her honor, but it is believed that the ax was removed due to a transcription error,” says the enthralled researcher.
Most of the objects on display are from the private collection of Bassat, today general director of the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), who in 2008 began collecting various pieces that tell the story of the war against malaria.
But that twig, more than 200 years old, was not one of those that can be purchased on online shopping platforms, so Bassat and the exhibition curators asked to borrow it.
Without it, the first chapter of the medical-scientific battle against the
Plasmodium
parasite that causes one of the infectious diseases that kills the most on the planet would be missing.
In 2022 alone, 249 million malaria cases and 608,000 deaths were recorded in 85 countries, according to the WHO.
Insecticide spray backpacks against the malaria-transmitting mosquito, from the mid-20th century.JESUS M. IZQUIERDO (MNCN)
The trees of the Cinchona family, also known as cinchona and growing in the Andes, changed the history of the fight against malaria.
Its ground bark mixed with some liquid
miraculously
cured the sick;
Today it is known that the quinine it contains has antimalarial properties.
A few years after the arrival of the bark in Europe, in 1820, the French Pierre Joseph Pelletier and Joseph Bienaimé Caventou isolated the therapeutic compound and the door was opened to the dosed manufacture of the remedy.
Then came the quinine fever.
“There are many stories of adding it to tonics, aperitifs, drinks...,” says Bassat, pointing to a display case full of bottles, containers and an advertisement for Vino Monja-Quina.
“Prodigious” healing properties were attributed to the compound, says the text prepared by the curators of the exhibition, beyond antimalarial properties;
For this reason, it was marketed as an antirheumatic, laxative, invigorating and even hair regenerator.
The popular gin and tonic cocktail comes from this effort to mix the medicine with liquids to facilitate its ingestion.
Thus was born tonic water, which, although it contained sugar, still had a bitter taste.
Adding gin came later.
Various products to which quinine (antimalarial treatment) was added because it was attributed prodigious healing properties.JESUS M. IZQUIERDO (MNCN)
A few meters away and almost two centuries apart, Bassat's next stop, on a tour of his favorites in the exhibition, is in front of two boxes of 12 Euratesim tablets, for the treatment of uncomplicated malaria.
“It was the first product I worked on as a researcher,” he recalls.
“It's from a small Italian pharmaceutical company.
I asked them to send the containers because I don't want the copies of the first batch that I have at home to be lost,” he acknowledges.
In 2005, the first drug trial was carried out in Mozambique, one of the 10 countries with the highest burden of the disease in the world, and in which the Spanish Cooperation and ISGlobal support scientific research at the Manhiça Health Research Center.
“The next version, in 2013, was pediatric,” he continues.
Boxes of Euratesim, medication to treat uncomplicated malaria.JESUS M. IZQUIERDO (MNCN)
Bassat's collection, now on display in the museum, is marked by his research work, but also by his training as a pediatrician and his origin from a family of publicists.
For this reason, many of the objects are related to antimalarial treatment adapted to children and awareness campaigns aimed at the population.
On eBay she got most of them “at a price affordable for a researcher's salary,” she jokes.
She thus acquired for about 10 euros a 1980 poster from India in which the symptoms of malaria are graphically explained.
“I like that it doesn't shy away from representing that, for example, it's going to cause you to vomit,” she points out to the individual drawn returning.
Information poster from India (1980) depicting the symptoms of malaria.JESUS M. IZQUIERDO (MNCN)
“I really like things from the fifties and sixties in Spain.”
He stands in front of a display with brochures, magazines and themed advertisements from that time.
“The last case of malaria here was in '62. And in '64 the end was certified.
This postcard was made to celebrate that Spain was at peace without malaria.
It had gone from almost 400,000 cases in 1943 to zero in 1963″, he says.
“With this exhibition I want to arouse curiosity about malaria, people still see it as something of the past.”
The researcher and the curators remarked at the opening of the exhibition this March that the global plan to end the disease in the mid-20th century was very effective where it was applied, but it had little of a global impact.
“It was eliminated from prosperous countries.
And they forgot about an entire continent: Africa,” said Matiana González, curator of the exhibition and head of ISGlobal's initiative on this ailment.
In 2022, according to the WHO, the African region will account for 94% of the cases (233 million) and 95% of the deaths from the disease (580,000).
“Malaria is the worst example of injustice,” she added.
Commemorative postcard of the end of malaria in Spain, in 1963.JESUS M. IZQUIERDO (MNCN)
Neither of the two words to designate the infectious disease refers to its true origin or transmission.
While malaria comes from the Latin word
palus
(swamp), malaria is of Italian origin and refers to the “bad air generated by stagnant water” to designate the condition, explains the Royal Spanish Academy of Language.
It was Ronald Ross who demonstrated in 1896 the life cycle of malaria parasites in mosquitoes, thus establishing the hypothesis that Laveran and Manson had already raised that these insects were related to the spread.
That discovery earned the doctor the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1902. A signature “in his own handwriting” is another of the star objects in Bassat's collection.
“It has great sentimental value.
It is one thing to read his work, but to have a piece of paper with his name, written by him...".
Autograph of Nobel Prize winner Ronald Ross, 1929, who linked malaria to mosquitoes.JESUS M. IZQUIERDO (MNCN)
Once it was known that malaria was not transmitted through the air, as was previously thought, but rather that the parasite entered the body through the bite of
infected female mosquitoes of the
Anopheles species
,
massive fumigations practically wiped out the vector in the northern hemisphere. .
An episode in the history of the unequal fight against malaria that is also part of the Bassat collection, which has DDT insecticide dispensers.
“Today it is prohibited due to the harmful effects on health, except in areas with malaria due to the benefit greater than the toxicity,” he explains.
Bassat does not remember what the first object he bought was, but it has become “an obsession,” he laughs and comments on the understanding of his family, who accepts that he keeps at home everything that has now become museum pieces, like his “favorite book”: a first edition of the
Book of Fever
, from 1712. “At the time, it cost me cheap.
It's worth more today, for sure.
It's wonderful with this fold-out poster that is the fever tree.
It seems amazing to me, it describes all of them and one of them is intermittent, like malaria, with very high peaks every 48 hours, which then disappears,” he details.
Quique Bassat, director of ISGlobal, whose collection of objects from the fight against malaria are exhibited in the Museum of Natural Sciences in Madrid, observes the first bunch of Cinchona (which contains quinine, which is used to treat the disease) that reached Europe from South America.JESUS M. IZQUIERDO (MNCN)
“This is a canteen from the United States Civil War,” says the pediatrician.
The word quinine is engraved, which indicates that the soldiers carried concoctions with the drug to avoid dying from malaria which, according to the specialist, killed more than bullets in many wars.
“This one cost me a little more, but it was bearable,” he refuses to reveal the price.
The story it tells is that of conflicts that cannot be understood without the diseases that devastated the troops.
And vice versa, since there are many leaders who promoted research into remedies to avoid losing their personnel due to various ailments.
“Artemisinin [a drug for severe cases of malaria] was found due to Ho Chi Min's request to Mao for a new treatment in the middle of the Vietnam War,” explains Matiana González.
If the canteen was not as affordable as the rest of the collection, a small chocolate bar was one of the objects that Bassat resisted the most.
She had read that in Italy they had made small tablets of sweet cocoa with quinine so that children could ingest the medication.
“As a pediatrician, I always wondered how they got them to take it, it's very bitter,” she remembers.
He, who has lived for many years in Africa (in Mozambique specifically), has had to provide the treatment to his children and knows how difficult it is for them to swallow it.
“He mixed it with yogurt and sugar,” reveals his strategy.
And when he learned of the existence of these Italian
snacks
, he did not stop looking for them until, finally, he found a copy.
Canteen carried by soldiers in the United States Civil War with quinine to treat malaria.JESUS M. IZQUIERDO (MNCN)
Chocolate with quinine that was given to children in Italy to take treatment for malaria, with a very bitter taste. JESUS M. IZQUIERDO (MNCN)
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