Malaria

a term including several fevers, as fever and ague, chills and fever, etc. Malaria is now believed to be due to a minute animal which multiplies rapidly when once introduced into the blood. Since 1894 scientists have demonstrated with reasonable certainty that the germs of malaria are drawn by a mosquito with the blood of a sick person, that they multiply in the mosquito's body and after a reasonable interval are injected into the blood of a second person through the sting of the insect. It is held that a person can be infected with malaria in no other way. The term mal-aria is Italian, signifying bad air. It was supposed formerly that malaria lurked in low, damp places, where it contaminated the air, but modern science has demonstrated that people contract malaria in these low grounds only because they afford breeding places for a certain dapple-winged mosquito that transfers the germs from one person to another, as it busies itself drawing blood.

There are several malarial fevers. One of the most common is the so-called ague, in which patients pass alternately from chills to fever and sweating. A chill lasts from a few minutes to an hour, the fever from half an hour to four or five hours; then comes from half an hour to two hours of perspiration. The total duration of a round is from eight to twelve hours. The traditional remedy for malaria is quinine, which acts as a germicide; that is, when taken into the system, it kills the minute germs to which the disease is due. In 1900 2,526 deaths from malaria were reported in the United States, considerably less than previously reported.

The mosquito-infected region of the Campagna near Rome is noted for malaria. It has been found that by living within mosquito-proof screens, especially at night, persons may live in the worst malarial districts with safety.

Mosquitoes that had feasted on the blood of a malarial patient in Rome were taken to London and allowed to bite a medical student who offered himself for the experiment. In a few days, sure enough, he came down with the malarial fever. The germs brought from Rome in the bodies of the mosquitoes had been injected into his veins through the bills of the mosquitoes. Only the female mosquito has a bill strong enough to play this evil part of carrying the germs of malaria.

The notion of the mosquito as a carrier is not entirely new. It is said that medical works written by the learned monks of Ceylon in the sixth century record sixty-seven varieties of mosquitoes and 424 varieties or symptoms of malarial fever caused by them.