History of malaria

[6] At the close of the 20th century, malaria remained endemic in more than 100 countries throughout the tropical and subtropical zones, including large areas of Central and South America, Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic), Africa, the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia, and Oceania.

[7] However, speaking on the BBC podcast More or Less, Emeritus Professor of Medical Statistics at Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine Brian Faragher voiced doubt about this estimate, noting that the Nature article in question did not reference the claim.

[18] The three major types of inherited genetic resistance (sickle-cell disease, thalassaemias, and glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase deficiency) were present in the Mediterranean world by the time of the Roman Empire, about 2000 years ago.

The term μίασμα (Greek for miasma: "stain" or "pollution") was coined by Hippocrates of Kos who used it to describe dangerous fumes from the ground that are transported by winds and can cause serious illnesses.

[24][25] The Chinese Huangdi Neijing (The Inner Canon of the Yellow Emperor) dating from ~300 BC – 200 AD apparently refers to repeated paroxysmal fevers associated with enlarged spleens and a tendency to epidemic occurrence.

[26] Around 168 BC, the herbal remedy Qing-hao (青蒿) (Artemisia annua) came into use in China to treat female hemorrhoids (Wushi'er bingfang translated as "Recipes for 52 kinds of diseases" unearthed from the Mawangdui).

[27] Qing-hao was first recommended for acute intermittent fever episodes by Ge Hong as an effective medication in the 4th-century Chinese manuscript Zhou hou bei ji fang, usually translated as "Emergency Prescriptions kept in one's Sleeve".

[28] His recommendation was to soak fresh plants of the artemisia herb in cold water, wring them out, and ingest the expressed bitter juice in their raw state.

The word malaria has its roots in the miasma theory, as described by historian and chancellor of Florence Leonardo Bruni in his Historiarum Florentini populi libri XII, which was the first major example of Renaissance historical writing:[38] Avuto i Fiorentini questo fortissimo castello e fornitolo di buone guardie, consigliavano fra loro medesimi fosse da fare.

Erano alcuni a' quali pareva sommamente utile e necessario a ridurre lo esercito, e massimamente essendo affaticato per la infermità e per la mala ariae per lungo e difficile campeggiare nel tempo dell'autunno e in luoghi infermi, e vedendo ancora ch'egli era diminuito assai per la licenza conceduta a molti pel capitano di potersi partire: perocchè, nel tempo che eglino erano stati lungamente a quello assedio, molti, o per disagio del campo o per paura d'infermità, avevano domandato e ottenuto licenza da lui (Acciajuoli 1476).

In fact, during the siege, many soldiers had asked and obtained leave permits due to the camp hardships and fear of illness [translated from medieval Italian, Toscanic dialect].

[39] William Shakespeare was born at the start of the especially cold period that climatologists call the "Little Ice Age", yet he was aware enough of the ravages of the disease to mention it in eight of his plays.

[41] Medical accounts and ancient autopsy reports state that tertian malarial fevers caused the death of four members of the prominent Medici family of Florence.

[44][45][46] In the book 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, the author Charles Mann cites sources that speculate that the reason African slaves were brought to the British Americas was because of their resistance to malaria.

However, as malaria spread to places such as the tidewater of Virginia and South Carolina, the owners of large plantations came to rely on the enslavement of more malaria-resistant West Africans, while white small landholders risked ruin whenever they got sick.

Spanish missionaries found that fever was treated by Amerindians near Loxa (Ecuador) with powder from Peruvian bark (later established to be from any of several trees of genus Cinchona).

[52] In 1717, the dark pigmentation of a postmortem spleen and brain was published by the epidemiologist Giovanni Maria Lancisi in his malaria textbook De noxiis paludum effluviis eorumque remediis.

[67] In 1848, German anatomist Johann Heinrich Meckel[69] recorded black-brown pigment granules in the blood and spleen of a patient who had died in a mental hospital.

Giovanni Battista Grassi, professor of Comparative Anatomy at Rome University, showed that human malaria could only be transmitted by Anopheles (Greek anofelís: good-for-nothing) mosquitoes.

[84] Grassi, along with coworkers Amico Bignami, Giuseppe Bastianelli and Ettore Marchiafava, announced at the session of the Accademia dei Lincei on 4 December 1898 that a healthy man in a non-malarial zone had contracted tertian malaria after being bitten by an experimentally infected Anopheles claviger specimen.

[85] A dispute broke out between the British and Italian schools of malariology over priority, but Ross received the 1902 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for "his work on malaria, by which he has shown how it enters the organism and thereby has laid the foundation for successful research on this disease and methods of combating it.

"[86] William Henry Perkin, a student of August Wilhelm von Hofmann at the Royal College of Chemistry in London, unsuccessfully tried in the 1850s to synthesize quinine in a commercial process.

[94] James in 1931 proposed that sporozoites are carried to internal organs, where they enter reticuloendothelial cells and undergo a cycle of development, based on quinine's lack of activity on them.

[101] In the same year, a human volunteer consented to receive a massive dose of infected sporozoites of P. vivax and undergo a liver biopsy three months later, thus allowing Shortt et al. to demonstrate the tissue stage.

This finding supports an intellectually insightful paradigm-shifting viewpoint, which has prevailed since 2011 (albeit not believed between 2011 and 2018 or later by most malariologists), that an unknown percentage of P. vivax recurrences are recrudescences (having a non-circulating or sequestered merozoite origin), and not relapses (which have a hypnozoite source).

Tu reviewed the literature, including Zhou hou bei ji fang (A handbook of prescriptions for emergencies) written in 340 BC by Chinese physician Ge Hong.

[132][133] Efforts to control the spread of malaria had a major setback in 1930: entomologist Raymond Corbett Shannon discovered imported disease-bearing Anopheles gambiae mosquitoes living in Brazil (DNA analysis later revealed the actual species to be A.

In Sardinia – the second largest island in the Mediterranean – between 1946 and 1951, the Rockefeller Foundation conducted a large-scale experiment to test the feasibility of the strategy of "species eradication" in an endemic malaria vector.

In 1953, the World Health Organization (WHO) launched an antimalarial program in parts of Liberia as a pilot project to determine the feasibility of malaria eradication in tropical Africa.

[149] The first successful continuous malaria culture was established in 1976 by William Trager and James B. Jensen, which facilitated research into the molecular biology of the parasite and the development of new drugs.