Malaria was a common affliction in populations that lived beside the River Thames until the middle of the Victorian era, not only in its estuary, but even in central London. It was frequently lethal. Some cases continued to occur until early in the 20th century. Why malaria died out in England is rather unclear.
Malaria was commonplace in the Thames [2] marshes, including London, and was called "ague" or "marsh fever". While not all agues were caused by malaria, most [3] scholars believe true malaria – the protozoan infection – was indeed present. Descriptions in early 19th century medical textbooks leave little doubt, since:
they invariably refer to noncontagious transmission, distinctive cold, hot, and sweating stages, tertian onset of symptoms, cycling relapses, anemia, splenomegaly or 'ague cake' [an enlarged spleen], and susceptibility to quinine. [4]
It was mainly transmitted by the mosquito Anopheles atroparvus, [5] [6] and was frequently lethal. [7] It was so bad that most clergymen refused to reside in their parishes, where these were near the marshes. [8]
Possibly malaria was introduced by the Roman invaders; [9] evidence from skeletons suggests the disease was present in Anglo-Saxon England. [10]
It was anyway rife by the 16th century, [11] [3] though the climate (the "Little Ice Age") was colder than today. [12] James I and Oliver Cromwell were thought to have died of it, and it was prevalent in London before and after the Great Fire. [13] Shakespeare mentions ague in eight of his plays as if his London audiences would be familiar with aspects of the disease. [14]
Mary Dobson said that
in the low-lying parishes bordering the River Thames and the River Medway ... burial rates were three or four times as high as those of the healthiest downland communities. [15]
Writing around 1800, Edward Hasted noted
it is not unusual to see a poor man, his wife, and whole family of five or six children, hovering over their fire in their hovel, shaking with an ague all at the same time. [16]
The heavy use of opium (often consumed as poppy-head tea) [17] and alcohol to fight the fever was commonplace. [18] Later, the disease was combated with quinine; that this treatment was effective tends to confirm it was malaria, and not some unrelated malady. [19]
At Guy's Hospital they frequently received ague cases from the Thames marshes, William Gull told the House of Commons in 1854. About a half came from Woolwich and Erith, but cases also came from Wapping and Shadwell, and along the river from Bermondsey and Lambeth and even Westminster. (At that time it was believed the disease came from breathing bad air – mal-aria – arising from marshes. Gull recommended the marshes should be drained.) [20]
Generally, deaths started to decline after 1800, although there was a fairly sharp peak around 1860. Some cases occurred in all parts of England (and even in Scotland), but by far the worst area was in the Thames (and the fens of Cambridgeshire). [21]
By the end of the Victorian era indigenous [22] malaria had nearly disappeared from England, [23] but a few cases survived into the 20th century enabling the disease to be positively identified by blood tests. It was probably caused by the protozoan parasite Plasmodium vivax . [24] [9]
While the draining of the Thames marshes did not, by itself, eradicate malaria – in places the mosquito still abounds [25] – it may have been a contributory cause. [26] Why it did disappear is complex and uncertain. [27] The mosquito prefers to take blood from livestock, so increasing livestock densities (brought about by the introduction of root crops as winter fodder) [28] may have diverted biting from humans to domestic animals. Other factors may have included better housing, health care, sanitation and hygiene (by helping to reduce transmission rates), [4] smaller rural populations as manual labour was replaced by machinery, and better insulation of houses in winter. [28]
In 2002 the Chief Medical Officer predicted that by 2050 the British climate might so warm that indigenous malaria would be re-established. However, a paper by Kuhn et al in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , examining historical data, disagreed. Temperature and rainfall were just two factors tending to increase transmissibility of malaria, but wetland acreage and cattle population were more important. The projected climate change, by itself, was "clearly insufficient". [29]
Malaria is a mosquito-borne infectious disease that affects vertebrates and Anopheles mosquitoes. Human malaria causes symptoms that typically include fever, fatigue, vomiting, and headaches. In severe cases, it can cause jaundice, seizures, coma, or death. Symptoms usually begin 10 to 15 days after being bitten by an infected Anopheles mosquito. If not properly treated, people may have recurrences of the disease months later. In those who have recently survived an infection, reinfection usually causes milder symptoms. This partial resistance disappears over months to years if the person has no continuing exposure to malaria. The mosquito vector is itself harmed by Plasmodium infections, causing reduced lifespan.
Mosquitoes, the Culicidae, are a family of small flies consisting of 3,600 species. The word mosquito is Spanish and Portuguese for little fly. Mosquitoes have a slender segmented body, one pair of wings, three pairs of long hair-like legs, and specialized, highly elongated, piercing-sucking mouthparts. All mosquitoes drink nectar from flowers; females of some species have in addition adapted to drink blood. The group diversified during the Cretaceous period. Evolutionary biologists view mosquitoes as micropredators, small animals that parasitise larger ones by drinking their blood without immediately killing them. Medical parasitologists view mosquitoes instead as vectors of disease, carrying protozoan parasites or bacterial or viral pathogens from one host to another.
Cinchona is a genus of flowering plants in the family Rubiaceae containing at least 23 species of trees and shrubs. All are native to the tropical Andean forests of western South America. A few species are reportedly naturalized in Central America, Jamaica, French Polynesia, Sulawesi, Saint Helena in the South Atlantic, and São Tomé and Príncipe off the coast of tropical Africa, and others have been cultivated in India and Java, where they have formed hybrids.
Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran was a French physician who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1907 for his discoveries of parasitic protozoans as causative agents of infectious diseases such as malaria and trypanosomiasis. Following his father, Louis Théodore Laveran, he took up military medicine as his profession. He obtained his medical degree from University of Strasbourg in 1867.
Babesiosis or piroplasmosis is a malaria-like parasitic disease caused by infection with a eukaryotic parasite in the order Piroplasmida, typically a Babesia or Theileria, in the phylum Apicomplexa. Human babesiosis transmission via tick bite is most common in the Northeastern and Midwestern United States and parts of Europe, and sporadic throughout the rest of the world. It occurs in warm weather. People can get infected with Babesia parasites by the bite of an infected tick, by getting a blood transfusion from an infected donor of blood products, or by congenital transmission . Ticks transmit the human strain of babesiosis, so it often presents with other tick-borne illnesses such as Lyme disease. After trypanosomes, Babesia is thought to be the second-most common blood parasite of mammals. They can have major adverse effects on the health of domestic animals in areas without severe winters. In cattle, the disease is known as Texas cattle fever or redwater.
Plasmodium falciparum is a unicellular protozoan parasite of humans, and the deadliest species of Plasmodium that causes malaria in humans. The parasite is transmitted through the bite of a female Anopheles mosquito and causes the disease's most dangerous form, falciparum malaria. P. falciparum is therefore regarded as the deadliest parasite in humans. It is also associated with the development of blood cancer and is classified as a Group 2A (probable) carcinogen.
High Halstow is a village and civil parish on the Hoo Peninsula in the unitary authority of Medway in South East England. It was, until 1998, administratively part of Kent and is still ceremonially associated via the Lieutenancies Act. The parish had a population of 1,781 according to the 2001 census, increasing to 1,807 at the 2011 census.
A trophozoite is the activated, feeding stage in the life cycle of certain protozoa such as malaria-causing Plasmodium falciparum and those of the Giardia group. The complementary form of the trophozoite state is the thick-walled cyst form. They are often different from the cyst stage, which is a protective, dormant form of the protozoa. Trophozoites are often found in the host's body fluids and tissues and in many cases, they are the form of the protozoan that causes disease in the host. In the protozoan, Entamoeba histolytica it invades the intestinal mucosa of its host, causing dysentery, which aid in the trophozoites traveling to the liver and leading to the production of hepatic abscesses.
Babesia, also called Nuttallia, is an apicomplexan parasite that infects red blood cells and is transmitted by ticks. Originally discovered by the Romanian bacteriologist Victor Babeș in 1888, over 100 species of Babesia have since been identified.
Paul Reiter is a professor of medical entomology at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, France. He is a member of the World Health Organization Expert Advisory Committee on Vector Biology and Control. He was an employee of the Center for Disease Control for 22 years. He is a specialist in the natural history, epidemiology and control of mosquito-borne diseases such as dengue fever, West Nile fever, and malaria. He is a Fellow of the Royal Entomological Society.
The Stateville Penitentiary malaria study was a controlled but ethically questionable study of the effects of malaria on prisoners of Stateville Penitentiary near Joliet, Illinois, in the 1940s, conducted by the Department of Medicine at the University of Chicago in conjunction with the United States Army and the State Department. The Stateville experiment was viewed as coercive because it offered shortened sentences to participants. The Green report was written in 1945 about it by Andrew Conway Ivy, used in Nuremberg Medical Trial, which affected the Nuremberg Code, and used to discuss how medical experimentation on prisoners should be carried out.
The history of malaria extends from its prehistoric origin as a zoonotic disease in the primates of Africa through to the 21st century. A widespread and potentially lethal human infectious disease, at its peak malaria infested every continent except Antarctica. Its prevention and treatment have been targeted in science and medicine for hundreds of years. Since the discovery of the Plasmodium parasites which cause it, research attention has focused on their biology as well as that of the mosquitoes which transmit the parasites.
Disease in colonial America that afflicted the early immigrant settlers was a dangerous threat to life. Some of the diseases were new and treatments were ineffective. Malaria was deadly to many new arrivals, especially in the Southern colonies. Of newly arrived able-bodied young men, over one-fourth of the Anglican missionaries died within five years of their arrival in the Carolinas. Mortality was high for infants and small children, especially for diphtheria, smallpox, yellow fever, and malaria. Most sick people turned to local healers, and used folk remedies. Others relied upon the minister-physicians, barber-surgeons, apothecaries, midwives, and ministers; a few used colonial physicians trained either in Britain, or an apprenticeship in the colonies. One common treatment was blood letting. The method was crude due to a lack of knowledge about infection and disease among medical practitioners. There was little government control, regulation of medical care, or attention to public health. By the 18th century, Colonial physicians, following the models in England and Scotland, introduced modern medicine to the cities in the 18th century, and made some advances in vaccination, pathology, anatomy and pharmacology.
Mosquito-borne diseases or mosquito-borne illnesses are diseases caused by bacteria, viruses or parasites transmitted by mosquitoes. Nearly 700 million people contract mosquito-borne illnesses each year, resulting in more than a million deaths.
Plasmodium coatneyi is a parasitic species that is an agent of malaria in nonhuman primates. P. coatneyi occurs in Southeast Asia. The natural host of this species is the rhesus macaque and crab-eating macaque, but there has been no evidence that zoonosis of P. coatneyi can occur through its vector, the female Anopheles mosquito.
Mosquito-malaria theory was a scientific theory developed in the latter half of the 19th century that solved the question of how malaria was transmitted. The theory proposed that malaria was transmitted by mosquitoes, in opposition to the centuries-old medical dogma that malaria was due to bad air, or miasma. The first scientific idea was postulated in 1851 by Charles E. Johnson, who argued that miasma had no direct relationship with malaria. Although Johnson's hypothesis was forgotten, the arrival and validation of the germ theory of diseases in the late 19th century began to shed new lights. When Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran discovered that malaria was caused by a protozoan parasite in 1880, the miasma theory began to subside.
Disease ecology is a sub-discipline of ecology concerned with the mechanisms, patterns, and effects of host-pathogen interactions, particularly those of infectious diseases. For example, it examines how parasites spread through and influence wildlife populations and communities. By studying the flow of diseases within the natural environment, scientists seek to better understand how changes within our environment can shape how pathogens, and other diseases, travel. Therefore, diseases ecology seeks to understand the links between ecological interactions and disease evolution. New emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases are increasing at unprecedented rates which can have lasting impacts on public health, ecosystem health, and biodiversity.
Airport malaria, sometimes known as baggage, luggage or suitcasemalaria, occurs when a malaria infected female Anopheles mosquito travels by aircraft from a country where malaria is common, arrives in a country where malaria is usually not found, and bites a person at or around the vicinity of the airport, or if the climate is suitable, travels in luggage and bites a person further away. The infected person usually presents with a fever in the absence of a recent travel history. There is often no suspicion of malaria, resulting in a delay in diagnosis. It is typically considered as a diagnosis after other explanations for symptoms have been ruled out.
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Malaria was a major issue in Mandatory Palestine, having been attested as endemic to the region since the biblical period. In the early 20th century, multiple malaria epidemics resulted in widespread deaths. The disease severely affected large areas of Palestine, including much of the land that was purchased by the Jewish settlement. Swampy and low-lying areas, in particular, allowed mosquitoes to thrive and made sustained human habitation impossible. However, a large-scale effort was undertaken by Zionist settlers to drain the swamps, clear dense vegetation, and implement public health measures to defend against and suppress the mosquito population, transforming the previously uninhabitable areas into viable land for agriculture and settlement and eventually leading to the complete eradication of malaria in the region by the 1960s.