Mosquito canopies would probably have been mosquito netting
or mosquito nets, still commonly in use in many parts of the world. Malaria
was endemic throughout much of the United States until relatively recently.
See a brief history of malaria below.
THE HISTORY OF MALARIA
Main source of information: The Malaria Capers by Robert S.
Desowitz
* Deadly fevers - probably malaria - have been recorded since the
beginning of the written word (6000-5500 B.C.) References can be found in
the Vedic writings of 1600 B.C. in India and by Hippocrates some 2500 years
ago.
* There are no references to malaria in the "medical books" of the
Mayans or Aztecs. It is likely that European settlers and slavery brought
malaria to the New World and the awaiting anophelines within the last 500
years.
* Quinine, a toxic plant alkaloid made from the bark of the Cinchona
tree in South America, was used to treat malaria more than 350 years ago.
* Jesuit missionaries in South America learned of the anti-malarial
properties of the bark of the Cinchona tree and had introduced it into
Europe by the 1630s and into India by 1657.
* Malaria existed in parts of the United States from colonial times to
the 1940s. One of the first military expenditures of the Continental
Congress, around 1775, was for $300 to buy quinine to protect General
Washington's troops.
* In the summer of 1828 "swamp fever" broke out in the settlement of
Bytown (Ottawa) and along the construction route of the Rideau Canal.
According to some accounts, the "malaria" was not native to North America
but had been introduced by infected British soldiers who had returned from
India. Numerous deaths had occurred by the time the epidemic subsided in
September when the mosquitoes disappeared.
* During the American Civil War (1861-65), one half of the white
troops and 80% of the black soldiers of the Union Army got malaria annually.
* More than an estimated 600,000 cases of malaria occurred in the U.S.
in 1914, according to information from the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia.
* In 1927, J. Wagner von Jauregg was awarded the Nobel Prize in
Medicine for his work in treating syphilis using malaria. Patients were
inoculated with a type of malaria to produce fevers that would literally
burn up the temperature-sensitive syphilis bacteria. After three or four
cycles of the fever, the patient was administered quinine for a relatively
rapid parasitological cure for the malaria.
* Malaria therapy for syphilis, using monkey and human parasites,
continued until the mid-1950s when it was replaced by antibiotic
chemotherapy.
* The Dutch bought Cinchona seeds from British trader, Charles Leger,
who brought them from Peru. They established Cinchona plantations in Java
(Indonesia) in the mid 1800s and soon had a virtual monopoly on quinine.
* When the Japanese captured Java during the second World War,
quinine, except for some old stocks became unavailable. The need for a new
synthetic antimalarial became a priority at that time.
* In 1880, the first true sighting of the malaria parasite was made in
Algeria by a French Army physician, Charles-Louis-Alphonse Laveran, while
viewing blood slides under a microscope. Laveran's discovery was rejected by
the medical community and it was not until 1886 that his discovery was
accepted by Italian scientists, the leaders in the field at the time.
* In 1882 the mosquito transmission hypothesis - guilt by association
- was first made.
* The December 18, 1897 issue of the British Medical Journal reported
that Dr. Ronald Ross discovered malaria cysts in the stomach wall of
anopheline mosquitoes that fed on a malaria patient.
* By July 1898, malaria transmission through the mosquito was
established. At that time, Italian scientist Giovanni Batista Grassi traced
the course of the parasite through the mosquito, and proved that human
malarias were transmitted by species of Anopheles.
* Experiments in India in 1932, showed that the monkey malaria,
Plasmodium knowlesi, which produced no clinical signs of malaria in Indian
rhesus monkeys, was fatal to Malayan irus monkeys and produced a 24-hour
fever cycle in humans that terminated in self cure.
* Unlike botanical quinine, chloroquine is a synthetically
manufactured product that belongs to a class of compounds known as 4-amino
quinolines, first developed in 1934 by a German pharmaceutical company.
* The first 4-amino quinoline was called Resochin. A slight
modification a few years later produced Sontochin. In 1943, Sontochin was
acquired by the Americans when Tunis was liberated from the Germans. Its
composition was again changed slightly and it was renamed Chloroquine.
* 1950 saw the launch of a pilot project for the control of malaria by
spraying with DDT.
* WHO initiated strategies for the global eradication of malaria in
the mid-1950s.
* In the 1960s, chloroquine resistant strains of Plasmodium falciparum
had arisen; the result of over usage and probably under dosage. At the time,
there was no drug to treat chloroquine-resistant malaria except the ancient
antimalarial, quinine.
* By 1966, it had been shown that 10 species of Plasmodium, naturally
present in monkeys and apes, were capable of infecting humans. Often an
infection in one species that produces no clinical signs of malaria can
cause severe illness and death when transferred, through inoculation, to
another.
* Quinine has now been completely synthesized. Its synthetic analogue
is called mefloquine.
* A "new" antimalarial is a drug called Qinghaosu that is derived from
the sweet wormwood (Qinghao) plant (genus Artemisia). It has been used in
China for more than two thousand years to treat fevers associated with
malaria. The drug has been shown to be effective in the treatment of the
most deadly forms of falciparum malaria and has been effective against
strains of Plasmodium falciparum that are solidly resistant to chloroquine.
* From 1956 to 1969, the United States, through the U.S. Agency for
International Aid, (USAID) gave $790 million to the Global Eradication of
Malaria Program. From 1955 to about 1970, USAID gave approximately $1
billion to WHO and various national malaria eradication programs.
* In 1967, WHO realized that the global eradication of malaria was
impossible for a variety of reasons and the focus shifted to control of the
deadly disease. In 1972, the Global Eradication of Malaria Program was
formally declared dead.
* In 1987, Dr. Manuel Elkin Patarroyo, a biochemist from Colombia,
developed the first synthetic vaccine against the Plasmodium falciparum
parasite. The vaccine is still being developed and has not yet proven to
reduce deaths in Africa. In 1992, Dr. Patarroyo donated the vaccine to the
World Health Organization.
Desowitz, Robert S. The Malaria Capers (More Tales of
Parasites and People, Research and Reality). W.W. Norton & Company, New
York, 1991.
To explore other links on malaria <01-01e.html>
Updated April 4, 1996. Copyright: International Development Research Centre.
Please send your comments to editor of Reports. <mailto:[log in to unmask]>
Nora Leonard Roy
Interdisciplinary Training Coordinator
257 Center for Disabilities and Development, The University
of Iowa
100 Hawkins Drive, Iowa City, Iowa 52242
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