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The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 years
In the existence of humans, there have been many deadly diseases that they have had to deal with. Even though the deadly lethal diseases, for instance, measles, smallpox and the plague, have been the centre of focus of the historians, Malaria has had devastating results as well. The disease has been a problem for humans for a long time, even in the current developed world. There have been many great and famous people who were its victims such as Theodore Roosevelt, Lord Byron, among others. The disease, mostly transmitted by mosquitoes, has continued being a menace and continues to affect a huge population globally, despite knowing the prevention and eradication of the disease which have been collected over a long time. The book The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 years is a detailed chronology by the author, Sonia Shah, of the interaction, both ancient and modern, between the disease and humankind.
The information in the article involves events around the world, current ones. She details the development and the growth in the number of people and the cases of malaria conditions that are located near some major cities around the world. She talks in detail about a small town called Chepo, which is approximately 2 hours away from the centre of commerce that is busy and modern (Shah). The town is the home of a community that is much traditional and indigenous and has little or no communication with the rest of the world. The low levels of connection with the modern world make education on the disease to the residents of the town becomes a problem. Lack of knowledge and the ways to fight with the disease and its spread has led to the adjacent cities having outbreaks of the disease.
The style of her writing is a simple one as she tries to explain the origin and the growth of the plasmodium parasite that is spread by mosquitoes. She does not include excessive scientific details in her details on the development of the parasite starting from the first instance when the first host is infected up to when the last target is attacked which includes birds, humans and also other animals. She has a detailed description of how the parasite has evolved to become the modern form of a bacteria. She further has included visual aids that are aimed at helping in better explanation of the way the parasite is structured and also its complex lifecycle.
The author has a detailed explanation of the role of the disease on the economic and political condition and the history of the world. She looks at the challenges of the disease in the expansion of the empires into the new world. The writer further details the way the colonial empires viewed the Africans as being resistant to the disease; thus, they were felt as being important in their exploitation of the resources in the continent. She has an explanation of the way that Africans had developed immunity to the disease due to them having genes that are described as being Duffy (Shah). The immunity they had was seen to be helping them to co-exist peacefully with the parasite, and the only problem they had was a fever which led to discomfort when they were infected. This, according to the author, is different from the Europeans who died when the mosquitoes attacked them with Malaria bacteria. The advanced immune system and resistance to the disease were used by the Europeans to make slavery necessary as they could withstand the consequences of exposure to the mosquitoes.
To make the readers better understand the condition, the author uses the thoughts of people living in the areas to show the status of the situation as they feel it makes a better explanation of the problem. She further argues that the countries described being developed the proper approaches that can help in eliminating complex diseases such as Malaria. She believes that the most significant developments in complex diseases come from scientists with less technological advancements. She states that scientists with less funding and development are the ones that are making advancements on the areas of the complex diseases. She further states that the discoveries and the progress of these under-financed researchers mostly go unnoticed, or they have been ignored (Shah). She contrasts the funding and the development of the Harvard Malaria Institute in the United States, where the cases of Malaria are very few. Still, the funding and the development is low in the institute such as the Gorgas Institute of Malaria located in Panama, which has many cases of Malaria.
Generally, the author of the work, The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years produced a book that has insight on the condition of the disease and its effects on humankind for many centuries. She offers a different way that the people living with the parasite can be looked at. It is a great book for people in the healthcare sphere and also those interested in learning about the parasite and its development over the years.
References
Shah, Sonia. The Fever: How Malaria has ruled humankind for 500,000 years. Sarah Crichton Books, 2010.