Medicine: Mighty Malaria

Malaria is stoically accepted as the recurrent curse of the Southern states. Last year South Carolina had more than its normal share of the disease and in Camden County, N. C. a particularly malignant form laid some 500 persons low in two months. These outbreaks, however, did not perturb the rest of the nation. People know that only mosquitoes carry malaria infection from one person to another. Hence those who live in malarial districts shield themselves from mosquitoes by screening their windows, putting netting over their beds and dosing themselves with quinine. The more foresighted prevent the breeding of mosquitoes by draining swamps and oiling ponds where mosquitoes lay their eggs. Thus malaria in epidemic form has vanished from most of the U. S. and people have forgotten that, except perhaps for tuberculosis, no single disease is spread so widely throughout the world, killing and disabling so many individuals.

Last week the forgotten might of malaria made itself heard. Since early December reports have come from Ceylon that malaria was decimating the 5,000,000 inhabitants of that tea-growing island off the southern tip of India. Last week’s dispatches mentioned 250,000 cases, 3,000 deaths in a single district. In some villages nine out of ten people have been stricken. What the British administrators who govern Ceylon as a Crown Colony mostly fear is that the Ceylon epidemic may spread to the Indian mainland and rouse a plague like that of 1908 when in the Punjab alone 3,000,000 people died of fever.

The micro-organisms which cause malaria breed in the red blood cells of human beings and in the bellies of common anopheline mosquitoes. The male anopheline is a vegetarian. But the female loves human blood. When she bites someone who has malaria she drinks his infected blood. When later she bites a healthy individual she plunges some malaria germs into his flesh. The germs make straight for red blood cells, dig their way in and live off the contents. The strain of voiding dead blood cells, manufacturing new ones and trying to live on a deficient supply is what was killing thousands of Cingalese last week.

The chill characteristic of malaria occurs when swarms of ripened germs burst out of dying red cells and scatter their spores throughout the blood. After the chill comes fever. This occurs while the spores settle into uninfected red cells. Many people, unable to stand repeated shocks of chills and fevers, weaken and die.

Quinine and certain recently invented synthetic drugs have especial affinity for malaria organisms in the blood. Careful and consistent dosing for eight weeks cures the disease in most people. Such a cure, however, does not give immunity against new malarial infections. Some cases are never cured although they may be latent for years. The reason for relapse is obscure. Specialists guess that the malarial parasite acquires a form which quinine cannot assail until some accident of ill health intervenes.