Interaction between ciprofloxacin and chloroquine in mice infected with chloroquine resistant Plasmodium berghei: interaction between ciprofloxacin and chloroqune.

The increasing spread of chloroquine resistant malaria has intensified the search for new antimalarial treatment, especially drugs that can be used in combination. Ciprofloxacin (CFX) a fluoroquinolone commonly used to treat bacterial infections has been shown to possess significant antimalarial activity both in vitro and in vivo. Thus efforts in this study were devoted to evaluating the antimalarial activity of combination of chloroquine (CQ) with varying doses (10, 20, 40 80, 160 mg/kg body weight) of CFX in groups of 35 mice inoculated intraperitoneally with 10(7) chloroquine resistant strain Plasmodium berghei ANKA. Parasitological activity and survival of the animals were assessed over 21 days. Parasitemia in non-treated control mice peaked at 78% on day 9 and none survived by day 10. However, the combination of CQ with 160 mg/kg body weight of CFX resulted in a reduction in parasitemia between days 9 and 14 and this was significantly lower than that obtained with CQ alone or CQ combined with the lower doses of CFX (p < 0.05). In addition, the combination of CQ with 160 mg/kg CFX significantly reduced mortality in the infected animals (p = 0.0002) compared with the other treatment groups. The results from this study support the potential usefulness of CFX in combination with antimalarial drugs for the treatment of chloroquine resistant human malaria.