The Making of a Tropical Disease: A Short History of Malaria

"The Making of a Tropical Disease looks at the origins of malaria in Africa as people began to settle around water sources and forests began to be cleared. He examines the ways in which migration and agriculture fostered the spread of malaria, through mosquitoes. He takes us all the way through the end of the 20th century, when the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation undertook its sustained effort to eradicate malaria in the developing world. Diseases like smallpox were successfully eradicated. Like tuberculosis, malaria is a disease that is impossible to get rid of without widespread environmental manipulation, including the eradication of mosquitoes. And with global warming, there’s the possibility that malaria will get even worse. This book is far and away the best introduction for anybody seeking to understand malaria’s importance in world history. That’s a good question. I don’t know that they do. The historical consciousness about pandemics is very shallow, unfortunately. In Discovering Tuberculosis , I show there isn’t much historical consciousness in the way that we treat tuberculosis. Drug resistant tuberculosis emerged as a problem in the early 1960s in East Africa, particularly in Kenya. We had the opportunity to deal with the issue of multidrug resistant tuberculosis, but nothing was done. Amnesia about the problem seemed to set in until drug resistance again emerged as a topic of concern in the 1990s, as if it was a new discovery. “Amnesia about the problem seemed to set in until drug resistance again emerged as a topic of concern in the 1990s” In the case of HIV-TB co-infection, it was very clear in the early 1980s that wherever HIV went, TB cases shot up. In the early 1980s, researchers were very interested in thinking about how to treat the two diseases together. But, for a variety of reasons, that research was never fully pursued. Then, in the mid-aughts, co-infection came to the fore, as though it was an epic discovery, even though co-infection was a problem that had been around since the beginning of HIV."