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Malaria Politically Strategic Importance
Spotlight on a historical continuum
Michel ODIKA
 May the past be taken as a guidance for the future…
Necessary preliminary…
Before anything, the amazing number of Nobel Prizes forMedicine awarded to works on malaria is undoubtedly testimony to itsstrategic importance. According to reliable statistics, approximately 40 %of the world’s population is at high risk of experiencing malaria and itsdamaging impact. Still, when compounded over the years, the diseasecauses heavy losses in terms of annual economic growth in the worst-affected countries…Historically, malaria is credited to bringing down wholecivilizations. Far back in the Middle Age (14
th
century), the disease, thenextremely devastating in Rome, instituted such fear in the CatholicChurch that the Vatican fled to Avignon (France) for nearly sevendecades
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.A few centuries later (17
th
century), however, Spanish Jesuitsstationed in South America began sending cinchona barks to… Rome.To the present day, much of the impact associated with malariaalmost entirely falls on low-income countries, with the heaviest toll insub-Saharan Africa. Most notably, the disease tends to trap families andcommunities in a downward spiral of poverty
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, disproportionatelyaffecting marginalized populations. Meanwhile, there was unrealistic
1. Exactly 68 years.2. Michel ODIKA,
The first wealth is health
(http://en.calameo.com/books/000021694c1cad4ed16ca).
 
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optimism that malaria could be eradicated “one fine day”. Nevertheless,as things now stand, greater emphasis is placed on control, rather thanon eradication…
Overview of a global challenge…
What else about malaria? Well, the disease has probably killed morepeople than all the wars and all the plagues combined, including theSecond World War. In a sense, malaria is nothing else than a “serialkiller” and a “massive destruction weapon”. Now more than ever, thereare still millions ofvictims due tomalaria every year (statistics aredifficult to verify), most within reach of medication, but it still kills toomany people every year. Perhaps soon it will be eclipsed by fatal viraldiseases, such as HIVand the ever-threatening Ebola virus, but malariahas shaped the course of history for centuries. Kings, military leadersandmany other top ranking officials or VIPswere struckdown in theirprime by malaria. For instance, lexander the Great,then overlord of anempire stretching from Greece to Afghanistan, was a young victim. Thisdeadly disease was at one time commonplace in London, Paris,Washington D.C., and even New York City, and during the AmericanCivil War, malaria was a major killer of troops. Nowadays, malaria ismostly confined to the tropics, and so is not widely understood or fearedin temperate North America and Europe.The name means "bad air," because people originally thought thatthe disease came from bad swamp air. Emperor Nero drained theswamps near ancient Rome, in order to rid the city of that bad-airdisease. It was not until 1880 that the French army doctor CharlesLaveran discovered a protozoan destroying red blood cells in the bloodof malariavictims, and the BritishphysicianRonald Ross found thatmosquitoes were carriers of the protozoans. Both men received theNobel Prize. The protozoan is a species of 
Plasmodium
, a flagellated one-celled organism with a complex life cycle. Many other vertebrate specieshave theirown, deadly species of 
Plasmodium
as well.
Cinchona
was originally used by Indians in tropical forests of northwestern South America for centuries, and around 1630 SpanishJesuits learned about the bark of this tree. The Jesuit priests got nativesto harvest the bark, and also to practice ecology--for every tree they cut
 
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down, the worker had to replant five trees, arranged in the shape of across. By 1645, quinine bark had been carried to Rome, for use at theVatican. However, in Europe Roman Catholics andProtestants werebitter enemies, so Protestants refused to use the bark, considering it tobe an evil papal plot; as a consequence of that bigotry, Oliver Cromwelldied of malaria in 1658, and so changed the history of England, onesupposes. Eventually "quinine" was accepted as a cure for malaria inEurope after heads of state were cured by a young and upstartapothecary's assistant named Robert Talbor, who treated Charles II of England and Louis XIV of France with quinine. After Talbor's death, theformula of his famous "wine," purchased by Louis XIV, was published,and malaria became a critical part of European medicine. This drugreplaced primitive "cures," such as limb amputation, blood-letting, andskull operations.Seeds of quinine plants were smuggled out of South America byCharles Ledger in 1865, for a fee of about 20 dollars (about the cost of Manhattan Island!), and some of these seeds eventually establishedquinine plantations in Java. This action obviously destroyed the SouthAmerican monopoly on quinine and established a new Dutch monopoly.The native who helped Ledger, Manuel Incra Mamani, was jailed, beaten,and eventually starved to death for his participation in the scheme.Quinine, an alkaloid, was isolated in 1820 by French chemistsPelletier and Caventou, and there is a monument in Pariscommemorating this achievement. More than 30 alkaloids are knownfrom the bark of this genus. In 1823, Dr. John Sappington of Philadelphia acquired several pounds of quinine and issued "Dr.Sappington's Fever Pills." He persuaded ministers in the MississippiRiver Valley to ring the church bells every evening to alert people to takethe pills, and through that enterprise, Sappington became a very wealthyman. Quinine and the temporary control of mosquitoes by DDT allowedthe United States to build the Panama Canal, because malaria waschecked.
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