bite me

Mrs. Scott said that all the settlers, up and down the creek, had fever 'n' ague. There were not enough well people to take care of the sick, and she had been going from house to house, working night and day... Mrs. Scott said all this sickness came from eating watermelons. She said, "I've said a hundred times, if I have once, that watermelons--" -Little House on the Prairie, Chapter 15, "Fever and Ague"

Statistics show that malaria was a major problem a dozen years after the Ingalls family suffered from it in Indian Territory; "malarious areas" included the entire east coast and from the Appalachian Mountains to the Rockies. Although DDT had first been produced in the laboratory in 1874, it wasn't until 1939 (four years after the publication of Little House on the Prairie) that its insecticidal properties were discovered.

In the summer of 1947, the National Malaria Eradication Program began spraying DDT on the interior walls of rural homes and buildings in areas where malaria had been a problem in recent years. By 1949, almost five million homes had been treated, and the country was declared to be free of malaria as a significant health problem.

But while DDT killed everything with six or eight legs, it also proved deadly to animals up the food chain, including songbirds and raptors (this is a good spot to get out your copy of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and read it again). By 1972, DDT was totally banned in the United States. Songbirds resumed their singing, and malaria went back to killing people, especially those in poorer countries.

Although Mrs. Scott and the rest of the squatters in Indian Territory thought "fever'n'ague" was caused by eating watermelons or exposure to the night air, some of the other guesses as to its origin are equally interesting today. An article published in 1872 reports that malaria was caused "by a chemical decomposition of impurities emanating from our own bodies, which circulating in the atmosphere and brought into contact with the blood, produce an abnormal change in the blood by disorganizing the venous and arterial systems." Another theory was that "spores of microscopic plants, living in the atmosphere, being of a greater specific gravity than that of the atmosphere, fall to the cellars and lower portions of buildings and breed in the moist filth there. Exposure to these organisms causes the disease." In these and other proposed causes, one can see that they almost have it. You can almost hear the slapping of mosquitoes while impurities are coming in contact with the blood or people are slogging around in all that moist filth.

Malaria, of course, is caused by a protozoan parasite transmitted by mosquitoes. While "killing the carrier" is what DDT did, mosquitoes were pretty good at figuring it all out and avoided sprayed surfaces or became resistant to DDT altogether. This summer, human malaria vaccine trials will begin in the United States, where paid volunteers allow themselves to be bitten by "parasite-ridden skeeters". Some will have been vaccinated with experimental malaria vaccines that were manufactured inside mosquitoes. Those who show symptoms of the disease will be treated using curative drug therapy.

It's too late to volunteer to have the ultimate Little House experience during this year's trials, so for now, all you can do is tack mosquito bar over the windows, keep your screen door from getting kicked through, and stock up on bitter quinine. Oh, and do clean up that moist filth in the cellar.
- posted by pioneergirl at 10:48 PM