How to Fight Malaria?

The number of people stricken with malaria fever in the world is about 800 million, of whom more than 100 million are in India alone.

British scientists have long exerted, and are exerting today, extraordinary efforts to wipe out that virulent epidemic. Their continuous efforts, pursued without respite, testify to the nobility of their purpose, which aims at rescuing the world from the clutches of the deadliest of diseases. We may say that the battle now raging between the scientists and the Anopheles mosquito, the carrier of this disease from one person to another, will inevitably end in the victory of science, provided the materials are at hand and effective plans are applied in this field.

Perhaps the plan of the Briton Sir Ronald Ross is the most effective known so far in fighting this malady. The mosquito lays its eggs in stagnant waters and swamps, where it multiplies with uncanny speed. And this is very easy: if we can obtain a kind of fuel such as mazout and spray it over the surface of the stagnant water, the larvae that would grow and become mosquitoes are smothered. This is the method resorted to by the British units, made up of specialists, in the countries of the Empire lying in the hot and semi-hot regions. But the Japanese seizure of the Dutch oil fields in 1940 prevented the continuation of this kind of struggle.

The second method aims at warding off this malady by means of drugs such as quinine. This medicine had become rare after the Japanese occupied the East Indies; the Germans, however, had prepared for this before the war and manufactured a drug they called 'Atebrin,' and the British, after obtaining it, succeeded in making a more effective drug named Mepacrine, which rendered the finest services to the armies fighting in the Far East. Today the activity of government is increasing in the countries where this fever abounds, to destroy those of the Anopheles which carry the malaria plague with them — so much so that the traveler to the hot regions may find Mepacrine tablets set beside his dinner plate, to be taken as a safeguard against the danger lying in wait for him. This is a sketch of malaria fever, the number of its victims in the world, and the methods of fighting it; and people are certain that science will finally wipe out this epidemic if they back it and carry out the precautions it imposes upon them — precautions that are for their own good and the good of their children after them. As was said of old: a dirham of prevention is better than a qintar of cure.