Marsh Mosquitoes

For mosquitoes, it's a slow burn.

Um, falciparum malaria, the really dangerous kind that's carried by those Anopheles mosquitoes, uh, becomes endemic in Rome pretty early, uh, by the first century certainly, probably before.

And so, uh, it becomes notorious that if you're in Rome, above all in late summer or in early September, or September, October, early fall, um, you're just gonna get malaria.

Everyone in Rome has malaria.

There's one city in, uh, what's now Turkey where they say the people are actually kind of green because they have malaria just continually, and their skin has been dyed by it.

And so malaria is a problem that's always there.

It becomes much worse under the Romans because there's so much standing water, and there's just mosquitoes, these Anopheles mosquitoes all over the place.

In the case of the rats and of plague, um, it's an explosion.

Subsequent researches in various parts of the world have made it evident that this blood parasite is in fact the malarial germ and the cause of the phenomena which characterize fevers of this class.

It has also been demonstrated that the disease is transmitted to man by mosquitoes of the genus Anopheles in the bodies of which the parasite passes through certain stages of development, resulting in the formation of a multitude of minute spore-like bodies which are found in the salivary glands of the insect.

Twenty-five years ago the best-informed physicians entertained erroneous views with reference to the nature of malaria and the cause of the malarial fevers.

Observation had taught them that there is something in the air in the vicinity of marshes and tropical regions and during the summer and autumn in semi-tropical and temperate regions which gives rise to periodic fevers in those exposed in such localities.

In the light of our present knowledge it is evident that the term is a misnomer.

There is no good reason for believing that the air of swamps is any more deleterious to those who breathe it than the air of the seacoast or that in the vicinity of inland lakes and ponds.

Moreover, the stagnant ponds which are covered with a green scum and from which bubbles of gas are given off have lost all terrors for the well-informed man, except insofar as they serve as breeding places for mosquitoes of the genus Anopheles.

The green scum is made up of harmless algae and the gas which is given off from the mud at the bottom of such stagnant pools is for the most part a well-known and comparatively harmless compound of hydrogen and carbon, methane or marsh gas.

You can understand maybe how the first one could have escaped, but as soon as that actually happened, you would have thought they would have been alert to subsequent cases.

So there were six cases, and then there was a bit of a hiatus, and then two more cropped up in a place called Schwanheim, which is a suburb of Frankfurt, about five, six kilometres from the airport, which is just about the maximum flight range of Anopheles mosquitoes.

Now...

And you know that.

or Plasmodium falciparum, which is the species that is the lethal one.

And it just shows that, A, the penny should have dropped earlier, but B, that this can occur and it can occur anywhere.

Now, whether Anopheles will then establish is a moot point because obviously it gets very, very cold in winter and I would doubt that this would result in endemic malaria, but it certainly does show that we need to be very vigilant about these things.

Can I ask you a question about this? Is there human-to-human spread of malaria at all or do you have to be bitten to get it?

Christopher here, with a small addendum sent by Avi after the conversation.

Mongolia is the only country with Anopheles mosquitoes that hasn't had malaria.

Now, back to the conversation.

But dare I mention a positive case? One of the greatest successes in malaria in the late 20th century is, of course, the People's Republic of China, which almost completely eradicated malaria through a program that combined both mosquito control with social development policies in a whole kind of mixed set of tools that didn't ignore the sociological boundaries.