In 2006 Schaller was trying to cure his family and patients but no Babesia textbook existed. His solution, Schaller started writing six books on this common single celled parasite carried by ticks.
In his first book, The Diagnosis and Treatment of Babesia on page 211--212 he proposes tafenoquine for Babesia many years before it is even FDA approved and before it was in any national pharmacy.
Dr. Schaller proposed this as a Babesia killed in 2005, or 18 years earlier. Prophetic yet again.
The recent article is "Tafenoquine-Atovaquone Combination Achieves Radical Cure and Confers Sterile Immunity in Experimental Models of Human Babesiosis"
Pratap Vydyam, Anasuya C. Pal, Isaline Renard, Meenal Chand, Vandana Kumari, Joseph C. Gennaro, and Choukri Ben Mamoun
Department of Infectious Diseases, School of Medicine, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.
Human babesiosis is a potentially fatal tick-borne disease caused by intraerythrocytic Babesia parasites. The emergence of resistance to recommended therapies highlights the need for new and more effective treatments.
Here we demonstrate that the 8-aminoquinoline antimalarial drug tafenoquine inhibits the growth of different Babesia species in vitro, is highly effective against Babesia microti and Babesia duncani in mice and protects animals from lethal infection caused by atovaquone-sensitive and -resistant B. duncani strains.
We further show that a combination of tafenoquine and atovaquone achieves cure with no recrudescence in both models of human babesiosis. Interestingly, elimination of B. duncani infection in animals following drug treatment also confers immunity to subsequent challenge.
Altogether, the data demonstrate superior efficacy of tafenoquine plus atovaquone combination over current therapies for the treatment of human babesiosis and highlight its potential in providing protective immunity against Babesia following parasite clearance.