Quinacrine for Tapeworm -The Disappearing Arsenal of Antiparasitic Drugs

Anyone ever try Quinacrine for tapeworm? I have read in several places that this has been used to kill the worm.

Here is info from the New England Journal of Medicine

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM200010263431718


The Disappearing Arsenal of Antiparasitic Drugs

To the Editor:
Parasitic infections remain scourges to people worldwide.1 Increasing international travel and immigration from countries where parasitic infections are endemic ensure that clinicians in the United States will be required to treat patients with these infections. Although safe and inexpensive treatments are available for most of these infections,2 there are few incentives for the pharmaceutical industry to make these drugs available in the United States.

In the past 10 years, several drugs — quinacrine, the most effective medication for giardia infection; niclosamide, the main treatment for Tapeworm infection; and diethylcarbamazine, the best treatment for lymphatic filariasis — have been withdrawn from the U.S. market. Diloxanide, perhaps the best drug to eradicate gastrointestinal passage of amebic cysts, was formerly distributed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), but it too is no longer commercially available. Intravenous quinine, the standard treatment for severe malaria in most of the world, was distributed by the CDC until 1991. At that time, quinidine was recommended for the intravenous treatment of severe malaria, because of its widespread availability as a treatment for arrhythmias.3 However, safer and more effective antiarrhythmic drugs have since become available, and quinidine is now no longer routinely available. Furthermore, halofantrine, an important treatment for chloroquine-resistant malaria, was approved by the Food and Drug Administration but was never marketed in the United States. Most recently, in June 2000, praziquantel was withdrawn from the U.S. market. This left no available treatment for imported cases of schistosomiasis, other fluke infections, or many Tapeworm infections. The manufacturer subsequently agreed to resume distribution later this year, largely as a public service.

The problem remains that our health care system discourages the development and continued distribution of drugs for parasitic infections in the United States. It is paradoxical that, despite the high level of expenditure on health care in the United States, we have less access to effective and inexpensive antiparasitic drugs than do people in many developing countries. Furthermore, even in countries where there are many cases of parasitic infection, the continued production of antiparasitic drugs is often not secure.4 For example, despite the ongoing epidemic of trypanosomiasis in Africa, eflornithine, the only drug for arsenical-resistant central nervous system disease, is no longer being manufactured.

A. Clinton White, Jr., M.D.
Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX 77030