Tournament of Pandemics - Plague vs Malaria - Part Two | Global Health

Tournament of Pandemics - Plague vs Malaria - Part Two

Published March 16, 2009 @ 11:16PM PT

This is the fourth pairing in the Tournament of Pandemics.

Malaria

Malaria is a nasty infection, and there is certainly plenty of it. 500 million people get sick with malaria every year, and a million of those people die of it. 40% of the world lives in malaria zones. It's evolving rapidly, and is now resistant to anti-malarial drugs. It's been around just as long as plague has - or maybe longer. The earliest reference to malaria was in China in 2700 BC.

Malaria is a lousy candidate for global pandemic, though, because it can't spread on its own. Malaria is spread by mosquitoes. And not just any mosquitoes. Female anopheles mosquitoes. In an infectious period. I'm sorry, no matter how bad you are for economic development, or what kind of fancy-sounding protozoan parasite you may be, you don't get to kill half the planet if you need a single genus and gender of insect to do your dirty work.

For one thing, if it looked like malaria was going to go all influenza on us, we'd tell birds of prey they were on their own, and break out the DDT. Which is deadly for the environment, but that includes the mosquito part of the environment.

The Winner:

Plague. This is another lopsided match. Malaria's dangerous and unpleasant, a drag on the global economy and capable of terrible local damage. Terrible for pregnant women. Right now, it kills more people every year than plague does.

But plague is exactly the kind of disease that turns into a global pandemic. It's got several forms and several ways to infect. It's been a pandemic before, and we have no real way to keep that from happening again.

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Comments (1)

The data reported from the WHO refer the presence of approximately 1000/3000 cases the year plague, distributed above all between Africa, South America and Asia. In the United States the last city epidemic of plague has been taken place in 1924-25, to Los Angeles, and from then the manifest disease in particolar way in the rural areas with a 10-15 rhythm cases the year, above all in the zone of the New Mexico, Arizona north and south Colorado, and in the zone comprised between California, the south of the Oregon and western Nevada. In Asia the plague is diffused in the zones of the Caucasus. Present also in Russia, in China, and also in some zones of south-western and Southeastern Asia. The plague is present in Uganda (November 1988, 49 cases), Malawi (July 1999, 74 cases), Namibia (May 1999, 39 cases) in Madagascar and Sudafrica.
The plague is instead absent in Europe and Australia.
Never as hour has been taken place, in our history, the requirement to one preparation in sight of an eventual terroristic attack. A terroristic attack could be put in action to means of crews of mass destruction, of chemical products, therefore like by means of crews of biological nature which virus, bacteria and other germs. In case of attack with use of products chemical and/or radioactive , the effects would be immediate. Many hours, instead, even days, could pass silently before stating the devastating effects of an attack of biological nature.
CDC declare that the plague is a possible biological weapon because the bacterium occurs in nature and could be isolated and grown in quantity in a laboratory.
Camillo Di Cicco, MD

Posted by Camillo Di Cicco on 03/21/2009 @ 05:05AM PT
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Alanna Shaikh has spent the last ten years immersed in global health; she has worked for NGOs, companies, universities, and the US government on projects that ranged from preventing antibacterial resistance to improving maternal and child health.