
Is Your Cocktail Making You Sick? - mistersquid
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/05/well/live/is-your-cocktail-making-you-sick.html
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gumby
You're recreationally drinking medicine mixed with alcohol -- what do you
expect? You wouldn't drink gin and asprin.

The article casually mentions "Quinine, used for hundreds of years to treat
malaria, is a well known cause of platelet and bleeding problems..." The G&T
was specifically mixed so colonial British could get their malaria medicine.

Ironically the origin of most cocktails was mixing in juices etc to _cover up_
the taste of alcohol (even the romans had to water down their wine to make it
palatable). But the G&T was mixing the alcohol in to make the medicine more
palatable!

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lukev
The woman in the article had a severe allergy. Many substances far more
commonly used than quinine can also cause life-threatening allergic reactions.

It doesn't seem quite fair to criticize people for consuming a classic
ingredient which is perfectly fine (well, as fine as any alcoholic drink is)
for all but a vanishingly small minority of the population.

~~~
gumby
She did but quinine has plenty of other negative side effects. I wouldn't want
to consume it chronically (notwithstanding grandmother' two-a-day regiment
allegedly maintained from the age of about 15 to her departure at 96).

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jfarlow
Looks like there's a known effect where quinine alters the binding
capabilities of antibodies, giving the antibodies affinities to substrates
that they would not otherwise bind to [1].

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/core/lw/2.0/html/tileshop_pmc/t...](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/core/lw/2.0/html/tileshop_pmc/tileshop_pmc_inline.html?title=Click%20on%20image%20to%20zoom&p=PMC3&id=4626254_2138f5.jpg)

Curious. Wonder what about quinine makes it a relatively common component of a
synthetic paratope.

[1]
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26282540](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26282540)

[edit] It looks like quinine binds heme to some extent [2] (as do most anti-
malarial drugs). And that this binding somehow prevents parasites from
properly digesting the hemoglobin protein. So if quinine binds heme molecules,
and an antibody in your body has an accidental affinity for the quinine-bound-
heme structure, the chances for an immune response seem high.

[2]
[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S104403050...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1044030504002879)

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Chris2048
What I find most interesting about this is:

> She can smell it even from the other side of the table

