THE FIGHT AGAINST MALARIA.

Hokitika Guardian, 23 July 1920, Page 1

THE FIGHT AGAINST MALARIA.

• (JLiy Colonel Sir Ronald Ross, K.C.8., | K.C.M.G., F.R.S., tire famous authors on tropical medicine and conqueror of the scourge of malaria.) Malarial lever consists of successive and sudden attacks of fever occurring regularly every day, or every two days, or every three days—called respectively quotidian, tertian, and quartan fever. After a patient recovers from the first series of attacks he is still liable, if not properly treated, to suffer from relapses, sometimes for years afterwards. Fortunately the case-mortality - is very low, but the disease is so very prevalent in almost all hot and warm climates that Lhe total sickness and mortality caused by it is.enormous. It has been calculated that in India alone over a million persons, mostly children, die of it annually ; and more than three hundred cases have been contracted even in England during the last three years. i T.hc ancient Greeks and Romans knew a good deal about malaria—even that it is connected with marshes; and Empedocles of Sicily is credited with having banished the disease from Selinus five .hundred and fifty years- before Christ by dealing with certain marshes. It was this Empedocles who, as de scribed in Matthew Arnold’s great poem, flung himself into the crater of Etna. All sanitary reformers, when faced Inofficial indifference, often feel inclined to do the same thing. The Homans j seem to have had an inkling that the disease is connected with mosquitoes, and this hypothesis appears also to have been in the mind of Lancisi, the Pope’s physician, in 1717. In 1880, Ur A. Lavern discovered certain minute parasites called Plasmodia in the blood of cases and showed that they caused the disease ; and these interesting little bodies have been minutely studied since then by Golgi and a host of other workers. Hut how do such delicate creatures manage? to get into us? Remembering the connection between malaria and marshes, we thought, of course, that the Plasmodia have some.method of living in stagnant water and enter us borne on the globules of water in mists, or by some similar route. The matter was of immense importance for the welfare of the whole tropical world. Tn 1889 I began to doubt the correctness of this idea owing to several facts which I observed in India, and 1 determined to investigate the matter. In the meantime, however, the mosquito theory began to be considered again by men of science, and was put forward especially by Dr. A. F.-.A. King, Dr. Laveran, Dr Koch, and especially by Ur. (now Sir Patrick) -Malison, who added a very strong reason for the theory. In 1895, 1 commenced a special investigation of the subject at Secunderabad, in India. I made- mosquitoes of many kinds bite patients with, the Plasmodia in their blood; but, as 1 had no means of knowing which particular kind of mosquito was concerned and what form, if any, the Plasmodia would take in the tissues of the insects, I was obliged to resort to the tedious trial-and-failure method, and obtained no result at all for two and a half years. At last, however,, on trying a now kind of mosquito, now known to be an Anopheline, 1 discovered the parasites in its tissues on August 20th, 1897, by a stroke of wonderful good luck. My feelings during this period, have they not been expressed in my book of poems called “ Psychologies,” and the history of my work given in my hook on the Prevention of Malaria. My labours were now interrupted for six months, but in 1898 I was able to work out the whole detailed life-history of this group of parasites in mosquitos by studying the allied parasites of biids. 1 had now found that the Plasmodium of a man or bird develops in a mosquito which sucks their blood ; but how do the germs return from the mosquito into healthy persons ? None of us had ever been able to imagine the wonderful truth, aud nature is more clever than all of us; for I now found that the spores of the Plasmodia get into the salivary o-land of the mosquito, from which it is injected into the blood of any persons whom the mosquito may subsequently bl hi July to August, 1898 I succeeded in infecting 22 out of 28 healthy sparrows and other birds by the bites of infected mosquitoes, thus completely establishing the whole cycle. A few months later my work was confirmed by Dr C. W. Daniels and Dr R. Koch, and was confirmed and pirated by certain | Italian workers, who also infected

healthy men in Home. But T had undertaken this investigation in order to save human life and when it was brought to this stage I determined at once to elaborate the proper means of prevention suggested by the discovery. This was done ui Sierra Leone in 1889, the details being published in the “ British Medical Journal of that vear. The new method was then successfully applied on a large scale at Havana, Isriialia, and during the construction of the Panama Canal commencing in 1904, when I visited Panama by request of the Americans. The results are now familiar to most- people. ' Similar work has been done'in many parts of the British Dominions, but not so much as I could wish; and I should like to conclude with a word of warm praise and admiration for Brs. Malcolm Watson and Cleveland, whose long continued labours have so. greatly benefited +he Federated Malay States and Cyprus, f have no more space for the other names I should like to mention.