TruthOut has published a very interesting article regarding the administration of neurotoxic levels of the antimalarial drug Larium to Guantanamo Bay detainees since 2002, despite the Army’s conclusion that malaria was not a threat at Gitmo — and public denials by military public health officials that Larium was being administered to those detainees.
Larium can cause nightmares, disorientation, migraine headaches and profound anxiety, particularly at the very high levels administered to all detainees arriving at Gitmo since 2002. It can also be neurotoxic, permanently damaging brain tissue.
Gitmo detainees received 1,250 mg doses — five times higher than those used as a prophylactic against infection. That dose would be appropriate for patients with confirmed cases of malaria, but detainees were dosed upon arrival, before lab tests confirmed or disconfirmed infection.
In fact, fewer than 1 percent of the detainees “treated” with Larium actually had malaria, military documents show.
Military officials told TruthOut the detainees were being “presumptively” treated for malaria as a public health measure.
But Hatian refugees who arrived at Gitmo in the 1990s with a high incidence rate of actual malaria infection were not given presumptive treatment with Larium.
One U.S. Army medic reported “increasing rates of psychosis” among the detainees in 2002.
An Army epidemiologist and public health doc described the practice as “pharmacologic waterboarding” and said the practice was medically indefensible. Research by that same doc — Remington Nevin — showed that much lower doses given to troops deployed to Afghanistan may have exacerbated psychiatric issues and suicidal impulses in some soldiers.
James McCarthy, chair of Infectious Diseases at Australia’s Queensland Institute of Medicine, said the doses administered to detainees are “hard to support on pure clinical grounds as an antimalarial.”
The obvious question — not conclusively addressed in TruthOut’s excellent report — is whether or not Larium mega-doses were a deliberate component of the larger “enhanced interrogation” efforts to disorient and confuse detainees.
