Malaria
A baby with malaria
(from World Health Organization)
You catch malaria by being bitten by a mosquito that has malaria parasites living inside it. It doesn't hurt the mosquito. When the mosquito bites you, the malaria parasites go from the mosquito's mouth into your blood and then they reproduce and make lots more parasites inside your body. If you have malaria, you start to get fevers and you feel first very hot and then very cold. About one out of every ten people who caught malaria died of it, especially if they were kids.
More people have probably died from malaria over the
last several thousand years than from any other disease that you can catch.
Malaria parasites probably first began to infect reptiles in West Africa and Central Africa, at
least a hundred and fifty million years ago (150,000,000 BC), in the time of the dinosaurs. Africa was warm and wet and so there were a lot of mosquitoes there. When mammals came along, the mosquitoes bit them too, and they also got malaria, and when people evolved about two million years ago, malarial parasites also evolved that were especially good at living inside people.
From its beginnings in Africa, malaria slowly spread all over Asia and Europe. Sumerian and Egyptian doctors from about 1500 to 2000 BC described fevers that sound like malaria, and DNA evidence from Egyptian mummies shows that they had malaria around 1500 BC. In India, people seem to have been catching malaria by 1000 BC, and malaria was certainly common in China by 1 AD or so. Malaria seems to have infected ancient Italy and Greece during the Hellenistic period (about 500-1 BC) and then northern Europe not until the Middle Ages, about 1000-1500 AD. Rice farming, in both China and Europe, turned out to be an excellent way to spread malaria, because of the standing water in the rice paddies. This led to big arguments between rice farmers and public health officials who were trying to stop malaria from spreading.
When European invaders came to North
America and South America
in the 1500's AD, some of them had malaria, and
American mosquitoes caught the disease by biting these sick people. Then
in the 1700's when European slave traders forced many African
people to come to North
America and South America as slaves,
they also brought malaria with them. The big rice fields helped mosquitoes to breed.
Gradually many places in both North and South America were infested with malaria,
and by the 1750's many people in North America caught it. By 1850 there
was malaria all over both North and South America. If you've read the Little House books, malaria is what Laura and Mary had when they had "fever and ague". Along with smallpox
and measles, malaria was one of the diseases that
killed most of the people who lived in North America - the
Chinook,
the Iroquois, the Cherokee,
and other groups.
By the middle of the 1900's, malaria became less common in the northern half of the world (North America, Europe, Russia and northern China). This was mainly because, thanks to the use of gasoline engines in tractors and farm machinery, most people lived in cleaner, less crowded places, and most people did not live or work on farms anymore. But in the southern half of the world (South America, Africa, India, and south-east Asia), malaria is still killing more than a million people every year, most of them children. Global warming caused by people burning oil is helping mosquitoes to spread malaria to places where it wasn't a problem before, so we can expect malaria to be even more of a problem in the future.
