The diagnostics and treatment of tropical diseasesStitt, E. R. (Edward Rhodes)
Science
The diagnostics and treatment of tropical diseases
Stitt, E. R. (Edward Rhodes)
Tropical medicine
We do not understand why in one case sporulating parasites
should plug the capillaries of the central nervous system,
with the production of conditions resembling well-recognized
nervous diseases, while in another case the damage is done the
intestinal mucosa, pancreas or lungs. At any rate these pernicious
manifestations of malaria should always be kept in mind when a case
of sudden cerebral involvement or acute abdominal disease shows
itself in a patient in a malarious country and a blood examination
should be promptly made.
_Cerebral Manifestations of Pernicious Malaria._—Various authorities
give different clinical pictures but the more commonly accepted types
are:
(1) The hyperpyrexial, when the symptoms are those of heat stroke,
with a temperature going up as high as 110°F. or even higher. Such
patients rapidly become comatose and as a rule die.
(2) The delirious and comatose forms are apt to be associated, the
comatose condition following a delirious state. Such manifestations
may or may not set in with a chill. Cases belonging to this group
may arise from a typical malignant tertian infection in which the
headache and restlessness have been unusually marked. The pulse is
full and fast with sighing respiration, hot dry skin and flushed
face. There may be rigidity of the neck muscles.
(3) Such terms as epileptiform, tetanic, aphasic, cerebellar
and bulbar have been applied to malarial manifestations and are
self-explanatory.
Cerebral malaria may give rise to a delusional insanity. Various
psychoses or amnesia at times follow cerebral types of pernicious
malaria.
_Algid Manifestation of Pernicious Malaria._—In such cases we have
a small thread-like pulse and a cold clammy skin. There are signs of
collapse. The respiration is slow and shallow and the voice weak.
It is customary to consider some of these cases, when there is
vomiting and diarrhoea, with painful cramps of the legs and scanty
or suppressed urine, as of choleraic type, while other cases, with
blood and mucus in the stools and marked abdominal pain are termed
dysenteric. Most dysenteric types only show a diarrhoea with the
presence of blood.
The dysenteric type is more common but the question always arises
whether the case may not have been really dysentery lighting up
a latent malaria or the lowering of resistance from the malaria
favoring a dysenteric infection. Stott had five algid cases of
dysenteric type but not one of choleraic. The choleraic types have
often been reported during outbreaks of cholera.
When epistaxis and haemorrhages from the intestines or stomach are
marked features of an attack the cases are termed haemorrhagic and,
if a prostrating, collapse-producing sweat be a characteristic
feature, they are called diaphoretic.
Cases have been observed when the excessive sporulation was
apparently taking place in the pancreas, giving the symptomatology of
acute haemorrhagic pancreatitis.
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