The campaign against malaria / Major Ronald Ross.

  • Ross, Ronald, Sir, 1857-1932.
Date:
[1909]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The campaign against malaria / Major Ronald Ross. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service. The original may be consulted at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service.

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    First let me emphasise the great importance of this practical side of the subject. Malarial fever is spread over nearly the whole of the tropics, abounds in many temperate climates, and has been known to extend as far north as Sweden. In vast tracts of tropical Africa, Asia, America, and of Southern Europe, almost every town and village is infested by it; millions of children suffer from it from birth to puberty ; and native adults, though they Lend to become partially immune, still remain subject to attacks of it. Although it is not often directly fatal, yet it is so extremely prevalent, so endemic in locality, so persistent in the individual, that the total bulk of misery caused by it is quite incalculable. More than this, its special predilection for the most fertile areas renders it economically a most disastrous enemy to mankind. Throughout tropical life, it thwarts the traveller, the missionary, the planter, the soldier, and the administrator. From one-quarter to one-half the total admissions into military hospitals are returned as being due to it; and it is often the most formidable foe which military expeditions have to encounter. There are reasons for thinking that it indirectly increases the general death-rate of malarious countries by something like fifty per cent. ; and I venture to say that it has profoundly modified the history of mankind by doing more than anything else to hamper the work of civilisation in the tropics. Only those who have studied the disease from house to house, from village to village, can form any time notion of the total effect which it must produce throughout the world. Next let us recall briefly the various methods which we possess for preventing and reducing the disease. The oldest of these— known to us since the time of the Romans—is drainage of the soil The reason why it succeeds became quite obvious after 1898 because it tends'to remove the terrestrial pools and marshes in which the Anophelines, that is, the family of mosquitoes which carry malaria, breed. But the new discoveries not only explained the old method, but also rendered it more simple, cheap, and yet precise, by showing us exactly what waters, namely those in which the larva' ol the Anophelines actually occur, are to' be drained away, or filled up, or otherwise treated. But science has given us other methods as well. Thus we have known for a long time that quinine is a preventive as well as a cure—that if, for example, a body of men are given quinine with regularity they will Buffer less from fever in consequence, btih further^ the old saying that the use of mosquito-nets at night will keep off malaria was now fully justified—not because the nets exclude any aerial poison, but simply because they exclude the infecting insects. This simple precaution can moreover be extended by protecting all the windows of a house by wire-gauze, as already frequently done m the Southern States of America. Punkas and electro-fans also serve to keep away the insects ; and lastly, segregation of Europeans from native quarters, as used so largely in India, wdl help to keep them