Is Your Cocktail Making You Sick? | Hacker News Reader

Is Your Cocktail Making You Sick?

nytimes.com

11 pointsmistersquid6 comments

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!

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.

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).

> You wouldn't drink gin and asprin.

You would do exactly that though, salicylic acid is found all over the plant world.

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...

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

[1] 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...

What I find most interesting about this is:

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

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