With the British drug Paludrine severe vomiting occurred at 1,000mg dosage and in some cases blood appeared in the urine, indicating kidney damage. There is no record of the dosages of the US drugs, but prolonged high dosages of Chloroquine are known to cause eye damage. Almost miraculously, no deaths were recorded, yet the authorities anticipated casualties. The drugs were later marketed worldwide and have become the standard treatment for malaria, which has one of the highest rates of infection and geographic spread of any disease. In the 1950s in India alone it killed an estimated one million people annually.
Malaria still kills nearly two million people globally each year.
The profits for Winthrop and ICI would be measured in the tens of millions of dollars. Other arms of the military used the men of the MRU for experimentation. Another group was subjected to the atmospheric pressure equivalent of 35,000 feet. The stated purpose was to see if planes were being lost as the result of pilots suffering massive malaria attacks. One would think that simple blood tests and the correlation of statistics could have proved that malaria was not a cause of unexplained crashes.