Quinine & Deafness

Of the 10,000,000 deaf people in the U. S., 3,000,000 are children. Of the 3,000,000 deaf children, almost 2,000,000 were born deaf. In the South twice as many congenitally deaf children are born in the last six months of a year as are born in the first six months.

In the second half of each year malaria is rife in the South. Quinine is the specific drug which victims of malaria take to combat that distressing disease. And quinine has a special, destructive effect on the auditory nerves.

Therefore, is it possible that quinine, seeping into the blood of the fetus when a pregnant woman with malaria doses herself, is responsible for the major part of the congenital deafness in the U. S.?

Last week Otologist Hermon Marshall Taylor of Jacksonville, Fla., president of the Southern Medical Association, resoundingly declared that this malaria-quinine-deafness sequence was a fact. And in a Southern Medical Journal article he gave this strong advice to the ear specialists of the nation:

"That the otologist has practically ignored the possible significance of prenatal medication in infant deafness may be due to the difficulty of early diagnosis. A child must be 2 1/2 to 3 years old before a diagnosis of nerve deafness can be made and by that time the prenatal history has generally been dismissed. The usual history consists principally of whether or not there has been a family history of deafness, consanguinity, hereditary syphilis or meningitis. It seems, however, that inquiry regarding the drugs given the mother during pregnancy may yield information quite as important as whether the patient had a great uncle or a second cousin who was deaf. If a large number of otologists will in future, when dealing with cases of children with nerve deafness, be careful to include in the usual questionnaire the history administered to the mother during pregnancy, there may in due time be collected sufficient data to establish prenatal medication as an etiologic factor in such cases as come under the broad classification of congenital deafness."

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