Some books in Annie:
AUTHOR Watstein, Sarah.
TITLE Statistical handbook on infectious diseases / Sarah B. Watstein
and John Jovanovic.
IMPRINT Westport, Conn. : Greenwood Press, 2003.
CALL NO. SCI REF RA643 .W33 2003.
TITLE Disease in the history of modern Latin America : from malaria to
AIDS / edited by Diego Armus.
IMPRINT Durham [N.C.] : Duke University Press, 2003.
CALL NO. RA418.3.L29 D575 2003.
TITLE The Cambridge historical dictionary of disease / edited by
Kenneth F. Kiple.
IMPRINT Cambridge, U.K. ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2003.
CALL NO. SCI REF RC41 .C365 2003.
AUTHOR Honigsbaum, Mark.
TITLE The fever trail : in search of the cure for malaria / Mark
Honigsbaum.
IMPRINT New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002.
CALL NO. RA644.M2 H665 2002.
TITLE Emerging infectious diseases : trends and issues / Felissa R.
Lashley, Jerry D. Durham, editors.
IMPRINT New York : Springer Pub., c2002.
CALL NO. RA643 .E465 2002.
AUTHOR Humphreys, Margaret, 1955-
TITLE Malaria : poverty, race, and public health in the United States /
Margaret Humphreys.
IMPRINT Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, c2001.
CALL NO. RC161.A2 H86 2001.
AUTHOR Desowitz, Robert S.
TITLE The malaria capers : more tales of parasites and people, research
and reality / Robert S. Desowitz.
IMPRINT New York : W.W. Norton, 1993, c1991.
CALL NO. RA644.M2 D53 1993.
AUTHOR Harrison, Gordon A.
TITLE Mosquitoes, malaria, and man : a history of the hostilities since
1880 / Gordon Harrison ; [line drawings by Wynne Brown]
IMPRINT New York : Dutton, c1978.
CALL NO. RA644.M2 H37 1978.
See also pro-DDT views
5 February
Some from Ron:
The Tomorrow of Malaria
By Socrates Litsios, Pacific Press, 1996. (181 pages)
ISBN 0 9583418 3 4(snip) Strategic plans for malaria control shifted dramatically from a broad public health and social approach prior to World War II, where malaria research in areas such as immunity and epidemiology were also deemed relevant, to the WHO's militant-like eradication campaign between 1955 and 1969, where DDT elimination of Anopheline mosquitoes became the dominant goal. Now, with reference to the changing politics of the post Cold War Era, Litsios conveys the message that it is an opportune time to tackle malaria with renewed recognition of knowledge and studies from the past, and where "human development" is also a focus. With this in mind, he carefully scrutinizes directions taken especially by the WHO as the world's leader of malaria eradication and control programmes for almost 50 years. His critical analysis points to conflicting viewpoints that have existed with regards to philosophical approaches, strategic planning, and methodologies. Litsios points out examples where knowledge of the times was overlooked as the WHO's global eradication campaign was designed and implemented; in some cases a sense of urgency overruled practicality; or, Cold War politics dictated its direction. Later, Litsios discusses one of the WHO's current focuses as a primary supporter and patent holder of the widely publicized candidate malaria vaccine known as Spf66. Litsios notes that once the results are available for the latest in a series of large scale trials - conducted in Thailand - that the future of this vaccine candidate "will be reviewed and decided upon." The reader is thus brought up-to-date as the world currently waits at another major crossroads to see in which direction the WHO will decide to proceed.
Litsios' critical accounts are meant to be instructive. He takes his readers through periods of high hopes, confidence, despair, and wonder, as history shows that massive efforts have helped little to avenge malaria - the "King of Diseases," which, as he notes, it was dubbed long ago in ancient Indian literature. The Tomorrow of Malaria is very timely as the 100th anniversary of the August 1897 discovery in Secunderabad, India of malaria in mosquitoes approaches. The past 100 years of discovery, both scientific and personal, are leading to a special period of reflection. Socrates Litsios, who is currently a Senior Scientist with the WHO Division of Control of Tropical Diseases, writes with a sense of optimism as he refers to the WHO's current Global Malaria Control Strategy, a product of the Ministerial Conference on Malaria (Amsterdam, 1992), and the end of neglect noting that this plan is "beginning to yield tangible results." He has hope in "the tomorrow of malaria" as he beckons his readers to be knowledgeable, logical, and responsible when deciding upon the present and future of malaria.
I especially recommend this penetrating little book to anyone working in any area of malaria research or control. This literary work may very well mark a reemergence of malaria scholars and help these fields flourish with accomplished malariologists.
Mary R. Galinski
Department of Medical and Molecular Parasitology
New York University School of Medicine
New York, NY 10010, USA
Published in Parasitology Today [PT 13 (2), 83-84, 1997]Google malaria eradication history
The Malaria Controversy from UC Berkeley
17 February
Malaria on the Move: Human Population Movement and Malaria Transmission (Pim Martens and Lisbeth Hall, from Emerging Infectious Diseases)It occurs to me that I should connect up various bits of malaria-related stuff I have in other places:
2001 collectionPubMed search malaria AND gis and PubMed "remote sensing" AND malaria
Apocryphal? (from http://www.surforever.com/sam/a2z/content3.html)
When malaria was widespread in Sarawak in 1953, DDT was used to fight mosquitoes - the carrier of the disease. In Bario, a small highland village about 100km from the coast of Sarawak, DDT was sprayed in the villagers' timber houses. The deleterious effects of DDT on the food chain inevitably took effect. Insects started to fall to the ground, and the lizards fed on them. The cumulative effects of the DDT, in turn, killed the lizards which were, in turn, eaten by cats. These cats soon died in large numbers until there were no cats left in the village. The rats, of course, had a field day, literally. They ravaged the rice harvest, as there were no cats to stop them. Desperate, the villagers implored on the government officers in Miri to send cats to their rescue. The air force responded by parachuting hundreds of cats into Bario. In related incidents, tiny beetles living in cracks on the timber houses soon devoured their host. Prior to this, the lizards had kept their population under control. With the lizards out of the way, the beetles population multiplied and consumed the houses one by one. The episode inspired an American environmental performer, Alan AtKinsson, to compose a song about it.THE PARACHUTING CATSOnce upon a time in Borneo
There was a U.N. group called the W.H.O.
There were doctors and bureaucrats from every nation
Working for the World Health Organization...The key word there is "health"
Well they said, "We've come to take care of ya
And cure this bad outbreak of malaria
It's carried by mosquitos you can plainly see,"
So they sprayed the whole countryside with D.D.T.And the people slept sound in their beds
Till their thatched roofs feel down on their heads
Well, how did that happen...There's a parasitic wasp whose eggs all hatch
In a little caterpillar that feeds on thatch
But the D.D.T. killed all the wasps at once
And the caterpillar ate the roofs for lunch
That's what you call a rude awakening...Well the bureaucrats said, "We can fix this up,
We'll put a new tin roof on every hut
We know it's kind of ugly, and it's noisy too,
But it's something that the caterpillars just can't chew"from the CD Whole Lotta SHOPPIN' Goin' On by Alan AtKisson
Day They Parachuted Cats on Borneo Published in School & Library Binding by Addison-Wesley Pub Co (January, 1971) Author: Charotte Pomerantz
Google borneo cats ddt has many versions of the story, which is mostly transmitted via Amory Lovins. One of them: THE CATS AND RATS OF BORNEO
By Silver Donald Cameron April 4, 2001 from The Halifax Herald Limited (http://www.herald.ns.ca)
At the beginning of an upcoming TV program on -- yawn -- economics, Amory and Hunter Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute tell a sad but funny story. Soon after World War II, the Dyaks of Borneo were suffering from mosquito-borne diseases, so their area was sprayed with DDT. The mosquitoes vanished, but the roofs fell off the Dyaks' houses, because DDT also killed the wasps whose secretions held the thatch together. The caterpillar population exploded, and geckos ate the caterpillars, and cats ate the geckoes, and then the concentrated DDT killed the cats. Now the rats proliferated, creating an outbreak of typhus and plague. In the end, the World Health Organization had to air-drop 14,000 cats into Dyak territory.
2 March
Harvard Malaria Initiative
The Malaria Project and Malaria Foundation International --and see Disinfopedia article and another on Malaria and DDT
Roll Back Malaria? The scarcity of international aid for malaria control (Vasant Narasimhan and Amir Attaran) Malaria Journal
Malaria Mapping Project: Mexico
Nader Has the Courage to Fight a Totem By ROGER BATE (LA Times Commentary, Tuesday October 12th, 2000)
Debating DDT from Environmental News Network ("Banning DDT is Eco-Imperialism. It's a model of environmentalists putting the interests of the environment ahead of human lives." Dr. Amir Attaran, director of the Malaria Project)
A New Global Effort to Control Malaria Jeffrey D. Sachs Science Volume 298, Number 5591, Issue of 4 Oct 2002, pp. 122-124.
Gates Pledges $168 Million for Malaria Research Martin Enserink Science Volume 301, Number 5641, Issue of 26 Sep 2003, p. 1828.
Malaria's Beginnings: On the Heels of Hoes? Elizabeth Pennisi Science Volume 293, Number 5529, Issue of 20 Jul 2001, pp. 416-417.
Malaria Parasite Outwits the Immune System Gary Taubes Science Volume 290, Number 5491, Issue of 20 Oct 2000, p. 435.
3 March
from Robert Desowitz The Malaria Capers (1991)
During the early sixties there were ominous reports from South America that chroquine [first developed in the 1930s by I.G. Farben] was not curing falciparum malaria. It was soon confirmed that chloroquine-resistant strains of Plasmodium falciparum had arisen under the pressure of overusage and, probably, underdosage. Slowly but inexorably, drug resistance spread throughout the entire malaria-endemic regions of the world... (206)No major efforts have been made to find an antimalarial to replace chloroquine. The motivations of colonialism and profit are gone. Pharmaceutical companies that once pioneered the development of drugs to treat malaria and other tropical diseases have, for the most part, dropped this line of research. The now astronomical costs for chemotherapeutic research, experimental and clinical trials, and steering any new drug through the legal-bureaucratic maze to obtain patents and FDA approval, have made the development of drugs to trat the diseases of poor people uneconomical. The stockholders would never approve of such altruistic fiscal irresponsibility. (207)
[Desowitz says that the environmentally deleterious effects of DDT were due to its overuse in agriculture, especially as one of the organochlorine pesticides in cotton (said by EPA to have accounted for 80% of use!)]
During the ten years that the [WHO-sponsored Global Eradication of Malaria] program was in effect, the nature of malaria had changed. There was no going back to pre-1955 conditions. The parasites had become resistant to the effcetive, inexpensive antimalaria drugs and there were no new therapies to replace them. When the Vietnam War ended, the U.S. Army's chemotherapeutic research effort, one of the few programs trying to develop new antimalarials, began to wind down.
The biology of the anopheline vectors had also changed during the "eradication years." Many species became resistant to insecticides... (217)
Update: Chloroquine-Resistant Plasmodium falciparum -- Africa (MMWR Weekly August 26, 1983 / 32(33);437-8)
Clinical Study Confirms Single Gene Change in Chloroquine-Resistant Malaria (NIAID News Wednesday, Jan. 24, 2001)
maps of spread, 1960-1989
prevention medications from wellontheroad.com
Malaria Vaccine Initiative (to which Bill Gates has contributed generously
Goats Could Replace Machines Making Malaria Vaccine
In their quest to mass-produce an effective malaria vaccine, scientists might one day replace expensive manufacturing facilities with a goat.
In a study reported today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences online, researchers developed mice that could secrete an experimental malaria vaccine into their milk.
When the purified candidate vaccine was injected into monkeys, it protected four out of five animals from a lethal dose of the malaria parasite. If the process can be scaled up to larger animals such as goats -- and early experiments indicate it can -- livestock might prove to be inexpensive, high-yield malaria vaccine factories.
"A vaccine must not only be effective, it must be cheap to manufacture if it is to be used in those countries hit hardest by malaria," says lead author Anthony Stowers, Ph.D., a malaria researcher at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). "Using transgenic animals to achieve both ends is an exciting possibility. If it works, a herd of several goats could conceivably produce enough vaccine for all of Africa."
Malaria vaccine developments review (Vasee S Moorthy et al. Lancet Volume 363, Issue 9403 , 10 January 2004, Pages 150-156)
Malaria eradication and irrigation (Sri Lanka summary)
Guidelines for the control of infectious diseases:Malaria (Australia, Public Health Division)
Under the Weather: Climate, Ecosystems, and Infectious Disease (National Academy Press, 2001)
13 March
The Contextual Determinants of Malaria (Casman and Dowlatabadi RA644 .M2 C58 2002) seems a superb collection, and makes me think how malaria is an especially interesting lens for Stewardshippy things --though this is certainly tempered by the realization that further adventures in such areas are unlikely at W&L. My initial thoughts run toward the possibilities of 'a course' centered on the human side of several diseases, and malaria as an obvious instance. It's all there, in glorious detail. The anthropology of disease, or anthropological epidemiology or whatever. But nobody wants it... and I haven't the energy or the narrowness of focus to MAKE it happen.
25 March
New Ways to Control Malaria Janet Hemingway and Alister Craig
Science Volume 303, Number 5666, Issue of 26 Mar 2004, pp. 1984-1985.
12 April
What the world needs now is DDT (New York Times Tina Rosenberg)