Kina office
The Kina office was an international organization to control and promote the production of cinchona bark . It was founded in 1922 after the First World War caused a supply shortage of quinine , which at the time was the only effective means of fighting malaria .
The area of responsibility included, among other things, the distribution of the cinchona bark contingents to the individual member states and also took care of the price stability for this raw material. Under the influence of the Kina office, the cultivation of cinchona trees expanded : the annual production of cinchona bark was 1500 tons per year before the Second World War .
Even the Kina office could not prevent the destruction of cinchona tree plantations from becoming a means of warfare during the course of the Second World War. The Japanese destroyed 20,000 hectares of cinchona tree plantations on Java and Germany tried to control trade in this raw material through occupied Amsterdam . However, the importance of natural quinine production has diminished with the development of new drugs. As early as 1928, IG Farben had found an effective, synthetic anti-malarial agent in atebrine , which, however, had serious side effects. During the Second World War, primaquine and chloroquine, two further synthetic active ingredients were developed that played a major role in the fight against malaria until the 1990s.
Footnotes
- ^ Jean Marie Pelt: The secrets of medicinal plants , Verlag Knesebeck, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-89660-291-8 , p. 70