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.

The Malaria Project

The Malaria Project PDF Author: Karen M. Masterson
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0698140133
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 494

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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 Colonial Politics of Global Health

The Colonial Politics of Global Health PDF Author: Jessica Lynne Pearson
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674989260
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 166

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Book Description
In The Colonial Politics of Global Health, Jessica Lynne Pearson explores the collision between imperial and international visions of health and development in French Africa as decolonization movements gained strength. After World War II, French officials viewed health improvements as a way to forge a more equitable union between France and its overseas territories. Through new hospitals, better medicines, and improved public health, French subjects could reimagine themselves as French citizens. The politics of health also proved vital to the United Nations, however, and conflicts arose when French officials perceived international development programs sponsored by the UN as a threat to their colonial authority. French diplomats also feared that anticolonial delegations to the United Nations would use shortcomings in health, education, and social development to expose the broader structures of colonial inequality. In the face of mounting criticism, they did what they could to keep UN agencies and international health personnel out of Africa, limiting the access Africans had to global health programs. French personnel marginalized their African colleagues as they mapped out the continent’s sanitary future and negotiated the new rights and responsibilities of French citizenship. The health disparities that resulted offered compelling evidence that the imperial system of governance should come to an end. Pearson’s work links health and medicine to postwar debates over sovereignty, empire, and human rights in the developing world. The consequences of putting politics above public health continue to play out in constraints placed on international health organizations half a century later.

Steering Against Superbugs

Steering Against Superbugs PDF Author: Olivier Rubin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019289949X
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
The societal consequences of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) are severe. They include declining health outcomes from longer illnesses, prolonged stays in hospital, loss of protection for patients undergoing medical procedures, increased health care expenditure, and increased mortality. They also include declining global food security as AMR damages farm animal health and crop yields. Despite AMR being a transboundary crisis, concerted global initiatives that effectively combat AMR have been few and far between. Steering Against Superbugs analyses ways to reduce barriers and create opportunities for coordination. The expert contributions in this volume offer specific and original insights about what global governance of AMR means, and ways to help solve AMR issues. They show that effective governance relies crucially on pursuing local level implementation of key policies, and equitable recognition of solutions across multiple sectors within countries, and across the Global North and South. With the COVID-19 pandemic, societies across the world have been reminded of the devastating consequences of not being able to effectively counter global health threats. AMR is arguably one of the most severe long-term threats to human, animal, and environmental health. There is momentum for global political action around novel and emerging disease threats and Steering Against Superbugs contributes with original and insightful research to inform ongoing and future debates.

The Oxford Handbook of Late Colonial Insurgencies and Counter-Insurgencies

The Oxford Handbook of Late Colonial Insurgencies and Counter-Insurgencies PDF Author: Martin Thomas
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192636634
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 867

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Book Description
The lethality of conflicts between insurgent groups and counter-insurgent security forces has risen markedly since the Second World War just as those of conventional, or inter-state wars have declined. For several decades, conflicts within states rather than between them have been the prevalent form of organised political violence worldwide. Recent conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria have fired interest in colonial experiences of rebellion, while current western interventions in sub-Saharan Africa have prompted accusations of 'militarist humanitarianism'. Yet, despite mounting interest in counter-insurgency and empire, comparative investigation of colonial responses to insurrection and civil disorder is sparse. Some scholars have written of a 'golden age of counter-insurgency', which began with Britain's declaration of a Malayan Emergency in 1948 and ended with the withdrawal of US ground troops from Vietnam in 1973. It is with this period, if not with any presumed 'golden age' that this volume is concerned. This Handbook connects ideas about contested decolonization and the insurgencies that inspired it with an analysis of patterns and singularities in the conflicts that precipitated the collapse of overseas empires. It attempts a systematic study of the global effects of organized anti-colonial violence in Asia and Africa. The objective is to reconceptualize late colonial violence in the European overseas empires by exploring its distinctive character and the globalizing processes underpinning it.

Learning from Empire

Learning from Empire PDF Author: Poonam Bala
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527525562
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
Internationalisation of medical knowledge, its circulation and implementation through colonial institutions have played a significant role in combating diseases of public health importance. With contributions from reputed faculty and researchers, this volume examines the dynamics of circulation of medical knowledge and the creation of webs of empire through medical curiosities, medical and architectural knowledge, medical manuscripts, African agency, medical ideas and management of diseases, surgical and anatomical knowledge and a collective scientific enterprise in translating ‘local’ to ‘universal’ paradigms of practice.

May We Make the World?

May We Make the World? PDF Author: Laurie Zoloth
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262546981
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 429

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Book Description
An in-depth look at genetic alteration in the natural world and the oppositions to it, seen through the case study of a gene drive for malaria. May We Make the World? is an engaging reflection on the history, nature, goal, and meaning of using a new technological idea—CRISPR-based genetic engineering—to alter the genome of the mosquito that carries malaria. This technology, called a “gene drive,” can alter the sex ratio in Anopheles gambiae mosquitoes, the key vector for falciparum, the deadliest form of malaria. P. Falciparum kills 400,000 people a year, largely the poorest children in the world among them. In her sobering examination of the issue, Laurie Zoloth considers the leading ethical arguments for and against gene drives, explores the regulatory efforts that have emerged long in advance of the science, and considers the philosophical questions raised by the struggle to eliminate malaria. The development of a gene drive for malaria will have far-reaching implications for it represents the first use of genetic engineering in the natural world and the first creation of a genetic variant intended to spread in the African wild beyond human control. Drawing on two decades of work, Zoloth brilliantly argues that we can understand the complex moral issues at stake only by carefully reflecting on the science, the nature of the local and global discourse about genetic engineering, and the long history of malaria, which—as it transformed from a worldwide disease to a tropical one—reshaped the world as we know it.

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.

The Guts of the Matter

The Guts of the Matter PDF Author: James L. A. Webb, Jr
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108493432
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
This engaging interdisciplinary study integrates the deep histories of infectious intestinal disease transmission, the sanitation revolution, and biomedical interventions.

Nothing But Nets

Nothing But Nets PDF Author: Kirsten Moore-Sheeley
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421447584
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 179

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Book Description
How insecticide-treated bed nets became a staple of global public health initiatives and reshaped health practices in Africa and beyond. Distributed to millions of people annually across Africa and the global south, insecticide-treated bed nets have become a cornerstone of malaria control and twenty-first-century global health initiatives. Despite their seemingly obvious public health utility, however, these chemically infused nets and their rise to prominence were anything but inevitable. In Nothing But Nets, Kirsten Moore-Sheeley untangles the complicated history of insecticide-treated nets as it unfolded transnationally and in Kenya specifically—a key site of insecticide-treated net research—to reveal how the development of this intervention was deeply enmeshed with the emergence of the contemporary global health enterprise. While public health workers initially conceived of nets as a stopgap measure that could be tailored to impoverished, rural health systems in the early 1980s, nets became standardized market goods with the potential to save lives and promote economic development globally. This shift attracted donor resources for malaria control amid the rise of neoliberal regimes in international development, but it also perpetuated a paradigm of fighting malaria and poverty at the level of individual consumers. Africans' experiences with insecticide-treated nets illustrate the limitations of this paradigm and provide a warning for the precariousness of malaria control efforts today. Drawing on archival, published, and oral historical evidence from three continents, Moore-Sheeley reveals the important role Africans have played in shaping global health science and technology. In placing both insecticide-treated nets and Africa at the center of global health history, this book sheds new light on how and why commodity-based health interventions have become so entrenched as solutions to global disease control as well as the challenges these interventions pose for at-risk populations.