Rare are the diseases capable of shaping human activity over hundreds of millennia. Malaria is one such malady. In “The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years,’’ Sonia Shah explores how it has shaped human history and examines the quest to find a cure and eradicate it.
This insightful book explores the human struggle with malaria not just from a scientific angle, which is cogently detailed without being overwhelming, but also from sociological and anthropological perspectives, which turn out to be the real strengths of this work.
Societies through the ages adapted to malaria and sometimes used it to their advantage. The citizens of ancient Rome, surrounded by swamps, were chronically exposed to malaria and so were able to build up some immunity. Thus, they proved less susceptible to its ravages than the soldiers of invading armies from the north who did not have this protection. By not draining the marshes, they established another layer of protection for their city. More than 2,000 years later the retreating German army employed the same logic to hinder advancing Allied forces, purposely flooding the Roman countryside in 1944 and triggering a malaria epidemic, which sickened more than 100,000 people.
In modern times, there have been many unsuccessful attempts to eradicate malaria. Those failures, Shah demonstrates, resulted from a lack of appreciation of the cultural and sociological mores and religious sensibilities of those assumed to be their main beneficiaries.
An example of this involves the mass spraying campaigns of the insecticide DDT to eradicate the mosquitoes responsible for the transmission of malaria. Despite what then seemed to be straightforward logic, unanticipated resistance was encountered. In Cambodia, Buddhist leaders objected to the mass extermination of insects from a religious perspective.
