While iron curtained countries worry about HIV infection these days, a mosquito borne disease is plaguing Asia and Africa. This disease is called Malaria.
The outburst of Malaria in the United States has been almost exterminated for the past 60 years. This infectious disease still continues to strike upon millions of people across the world namely in parts of the sub-Saharan Africa and in subtropical countries. There are around 300 million to 500 million people that are troubled by malaria every year. The usual symptoms of malaria are fevers and chills. There also seldom cases where a patient can experience convulsions, hallucinations and even death.
In the book The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years, the author Sonia Shah wrote about the different historical factors that brought about the long-infecting disease which has troubled humans for over thousands of years.
Sonia Shah tells about the ways to avoid malaria infection among the citizens in the U.S. Shah explains, “The trick is knowing where those mosquitoes are living, and building our habitats far away enough so they don’t bite us — and [then] protecting ourselves during the times that they bite. These are things that entomologists have figured out in many places. … [And] the [malarial] treatments we have actually kill the parasites in our bodies so that we’re not infective anymore. So if we get prompt treatment, [we] can also start to end malaria, and of course that is what we’ve done here in the United States. Prompt treatment and changing the way we live actually has protected us.”
The highlights of the interview focused on the malaria parasite that infiltrates mosquitoes, the way malaria spreads, the symbiotic relationship between the mosquito and the malaria parasite developed and the possibility of an outbreak in the United States.
The parasites are called Plasmodium according to Shah. She said, “They hide in our liver for a while, but what they’re really after is the hemoglobin in our red blood cells, so that’s what they feast upon, and then they leave to go on and infect another person. So it’s this cycle of being infected by malaria parasites and having them feed on our red blood cells — the hemoglobin in our red blood cells — that makes us sick from malaria.”
Shah also said that malaria could spread not only through the carriage of mosquitoes but also humans themselves. These parasites also developed a symbiotic relationship with the mosquitoes since both of them reproduce in the water.
