Malaria in Colonial South Asia

Malaria in Colonial South Asia PDF Author: Sheila Zurbrigg
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000691454
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
This book highlights the role of acute hunger in malaria lethality in colonial South Asia and investigates how this understanding came to be lost in modern medical, epidemic, and historiographic thought. Using the case studies of colonial Punjab, Sri Lanka, and Bengal, it traces the loss of fundamental concepts and language of hunger in the inter-war period with the reductive application of the new specialisms of nutritional science and immunology, and a parallel loss of the distinction between infection (transmission) and morbid disease. The study locates the final demise of the ‘Human Factor’ (hunger) in malaria history within pre- and early post-WW2 international health institutions – the International Health Division of the Rockefeller Foundation and the nascent WHO’s Expert Committee on Malaria. It examines the implications of this epistemic shift for interpreting South Asian health history, and reclaims a broader understanding of common endemic infection (endemiology) as a prime driver, in the context of subsistence precarity, of epidemic mortality history and demographic change. This book will be useful to scholars and researchers of public health, social medicine and social epidemiology, imperial history, epidemic and demographic history, history of medicine, medical sociology, and sociology.

Malaria in Colonial South Asia

Malaria in Colonial South Asia PDF Author: Sheila Zurbrigg
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000691454
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 316

Get Book

Book Description
This book highlights the role of acute hunger in malaria lethality in colonial South Asia and investigates how this understanding came to be lost in modern medical, epidemic, and historiographic thought. Using the case studies of colonial Punjab, Sri Lanka, and Bengal, it traces the loss of fundamental concepts and language of hunger in the inter-war period with the reductive application of the new specialisms of nutritional science and immunology, and a parallel loss of the distinction between infection (transmission) and morbid disease. The study locates the final demise of the ‘Human Factor’ (hunger) in malaria history within pre- and early post-WW2 international health institutions – the International Health Division of the Rockefeller Foundation and the nascent WHO’s Expert Committee on Malaria. It examines the implications of this epistemic shift for interpreting South Asian health history, and reclaims a broader understanding of common endemic infection (endemiology) as a prime driver, in the context of subsistence precarity, of epidemic mortality history and demographic change. This book will be useful to scholars and researchers of public health, social medicine and social epidemiology, imperial history, epidemic and demographic history, history of medicine, medical sociology, and sociology.

Malaria in South Asia

Malaria in South Asia PDF Author: Rais Akhtar
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 9048133580
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Malaria is one of the most widespread and devastating infectious diseases in the world. More than half the world population residing in over 100 countries is at risk of infection from this vector-borne disease. An estimated 250–500 million mal- ial cases occur each year, resulting in nearly one million deaths, the overwhelming majority of which are children. Because of the magnitude of the associated fata- ties, development experts consider malaria a ‘silent tsunami,’ comparing its death toll to the Indian Ocean tsunami (IOT) that ravaged several countries of South and Southeast Asia on December 26, 2004. That tsunami killed some 300,000 people (including children) at once. Globally, malarial deaths account for about 9% of all childhood deaths each year. However, with malaria more than most fatal d- eases, mortality is a small fraction of morbidity. Malaria is a debilitating disease, particularly for the adult population. In addition to children, pregnant women and migrating populations are most v- nerable to malaria. Miscarriage, stillbirth, and low birth weight are common among pregnant women who are infected with this disease. Malaria manifests itself through recurrent fever and chills, with associated symptoms such as anemia and an enlarged spleen. If a person survives the disease, he or she will develop a certain degree of immunity for some years. But malaria victims are not only deprived of energy, they also face an increased risk of other diseases taking hold in the weakened body.

Epidemic Malaria and Hunger in Colonial Punjab

Epidemic Malaria and Hunger in Colonial Punjab PDF Author: Sheila Zurbrigg
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 0429758766
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Book Description
This book documents the primary role of acute hunger (semi- and frank starvation) in the ‘fulminant’ malaria epidemics that repeatedly afflicted the northwest plains of British India through the first half of colonial rule. Using Punjab vital registration data and regression analysis it also tracks the marked decline in annual malaria mortality after 1908 with the control of famine, despite continuing post-monsoonal malaria transmission across the province. The study establishes a time-series of annual malaria mortality estimates for each of the 23 plains districts of colonial Punjab province between 1868 and 1947 and for the early post-Independence years (1948-60) in (East) Punjab State. It goes on to investigate the political imperatives motivating malaria policy shifts on the part of the British Raj. This work reclaims the role of hunger in Punjab malaria mortality history and, in turn, raises larger epistemic questions regarding the adequacy of modern concepts of nutrition and epidemic causation in historical and demographic analysis. Part of The Social History of Health and Medicine in South Asia series, this book will be useful to scholars and researchers of colonial history, modern history, social medicine, social anthropology and public health.

Malarial Subjects

Malarial Subjects PDF Author: Rohan Deb Roy
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107172365
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
This book examines how and why British imperial rule shaped scientific knowledge about malaria and its cures in nineteenth-century India. This title is also available as Open Access.

Saving Lives, Buying Time

Saving Lives, Buying Time PDF Author: Institute of Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309165938
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
For more than 50 years, low-cost antimalarial drugs silently saved millions of lives and cured billions of debilitating infections. Today, however, these drugs no longer work against the deadliest form of malaria that exists throughout the world. Malaria deaths in sub-Saharan Africaâ€"currently just over one million per yearâ€"are rising because of increased resistance to the old, inexpensive drugs. Although effective new drugs called "artemisinins" are available, they are unaffordable for the majority of the affected population, even at a cost of one dollar per course. Saving Lives, Buying Time: Economics of Malaria Drugs in an Age of Resistance examines the history of malaria treatments, provides an overview of the current drug crisis, and offers recommendations on maximizing access to and effectiveness of antimalarial drugs. The book finds that most people in endemic countries will not have access to currently effective combination treatments, which should include an artemisinin, without financing from the global community. Without funding for effective treatment, malaria mortality could double over the next 10 to 20 years and transmission will intensify.

The Fever Trail

The Fever Trail PDF Author: Mark Honigsbaum
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312421809
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
Literally Italian for "bad air," malaria once plagued Rome, tropical trade routes and colonial ventures into India and South America and the disease has no known antidote aside from the therapeutic effects of the "miraculous" quinine. This first book from journalist Honigsbaum is a rousing history of the search for febrifuge or, more specifically, the rare red cinchona tree, the bark from which quinine is derived.

The Making of a Tropical Disease

The Making of a Tropical Disease PDF Author: Randall M. Packard
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421441799
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 351

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Book Description
A global history of malaria that traces the natural and social forces that have shaped its spread and made it deadly, while limiting efforts to eliminate it. Malaria sickens hundreds of millions of people—and kills nearly a half a million—each year. Despite massive efforts to eradicate the disease, it remains a major public health problem in poorer tropical regions. But malaria has not always been concentrated in tropical areas. How did malaria disappear from other regions, and why does it persist in the tropics? From Russia to Bengal to Palm Beach, Randall M. Packard's far-ranging narrative shows how the history of malaria has been driven by the interplay of social, biological, economic, and environmental forces. The shifting alignment of these forces has largely determined the social and geographical distribution of the disease, including its initial global expansion, its subsequent retreat to the tropics, and its current persistence. Packard argues that efforts to control and eliminate malaria have often ignored this reality, relying on the use of biotechnologies to fight the disease. Failure to address the forces driving malaria transmission have undermined past control efforts. Describing major changes in both the epidemiology of malaria and efforts to control the disease, the revised edition of this acclaimed history, which was chosen as the 2008 End Malaria Awards Book of the Year in its original printing, • examines recent efforts to eradicate malaria following massive increases in funding and political commitment; • discusses the development of new malaria-fighting biotechnologies, including long-lasting insecticide-treated nets, rapid diagnostic tests, combination artemisinin therapies, and genetically modified mosquitoes; • explores the efficacy of newly developed vaccines; and • explains why eliminating malaria will also require addressing the social forces that drive the disease and building health infrastructures that can identify and treat the last cases of malaria. Authoritative, fascinating, and eye-opening, this short history of malaria concludes with policy recommendations for improving control strategies and saving lives.

Society, Medicine and Politics in Colonial India

Society, Medicine and Politics in Colonial India PDF Author: Biswamoy Pati
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351262181
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
The history of medicine and disease in colonial India remains a dynamic and innovative field of research, covering many facets of health, from government policy to local therapeutics. This volume presents a selection of essays examining varied aspects of health and medicine as they relate to the political upheavals of the colonial era. These range from the micro-politics of medicine in princely states and institutions such as asylums through to the wider canvas of sanitary diplomacy as well as the meaning of modernity and modernization in the context of British rule. The volume reflects the diversity of the field and showcases exciting new scholarship from early-career researchers as well as more established scholars by bringing to light many locations and dimensions of medicine and modernity. The essays have several common themes and together offer important insights into South Asia’s experience of modernity in the years before independence. Cutting across modernity and colonialism, some of the key themes explored here include issues of race, gender, sexuality, law, mental health, famine, disease, religion, missionary medicine, medical research, tensions between and within different medical traditions and practices and India’s place in an international context. This book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of modern South Asian history, sociology, politics and anthropology as well as specialists in the history of medicine.

The Malaria Project

The Malaria Project PDF Author: Karen M. Masterson
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0698140133
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
A fascinating and shocking historical exposé, The Malaria Project is the story of America's secret mission to combat malaria during World War II—a campaign modeled after a German project which tested experimental drugs on men gone mad from syphilis. American war planners, foreseeing the tactical need for a malaria drug, recreated the German model, then grew it tenfold. Quickly becoming the biggest and most important medical initiative of the war, the project tasked dozens of the country’s top research scientists and university labs to find a treatment to remedy half a million U.S. troops incapacitated by malaria. Spearheading the new U.S. effort was Dr. Lowell T. Coggeshall, the son of a poor Indiana farmer whose persistent drive and curiosity led him to become one of the most innovative thinkers in solving the malaria problem. He recruited private corporations, such as today's Squibb and Eli Lilly, and the nation’s best chemists out of Harvard and Johns Hopkins to make novel compounds that skilled technicians tested on birds. Giants in the field of clinical research, including the future NIH director James Shannon, then tested the drugs on mental health patients and convicted criminals—including infamous murderer Nathan Leopold. By 1943, a dozen strains of malaria brought home in the veins of sick soldiers were injected into these human guinea pigs for drug studies. After hundreds of trials and many deaths, they found their “magic bullet,” but not in a U.S. laboratory. America 's best weapon against malaria, still used today, was captured in battle from the Nazis. Called chloroquine, it went on to save more lives than any other drug in history. Karen M. Masterson, a journalist turned malaria researcher, uncovers the complete story behind this dark tale of science, medicine and war. Illuminating, riveting and surprising, The Malaria Project captures the ethical perils of seeking treatments for disease while ignoring the human condition.

The Long Struggle against Malaria in Tropical Africa

The Long Struggle against Malaria in Tropical Africa PDF Author: James L. A. Webb (Jr.)
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107052572
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
The first history of malaria control efforts in tropical Africa, contributing to the emerging sub-discipline of the historical epidemiology of contemporary disease challenges.