The objective of this project, """"""""Malaria in Africa: A History of Infections and Interventions, 1900- 2010,"""""""" is to write a history of malaria control efforts in Sub-Saharan Africa.
The aim i s to gain an understanding of the types of malaria control projects that were undertaken, their scales, and their impacts. The results will inform the work of malaria specialist and public health professionals in planning future malaria interventions. The book will be based upon research that the applicant has already carried out in the archives of the United States Public Health Service, the United States Center for Disease Control, the United States Agency for International Development, the French colonial medical archives, the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the Johns Hopkins University, and the World Health Organization. It will explore the history and the impacts of malaria interventions over the period 1900-2010, including environmental management programs such as the draining of swamps, the destruction of mosquito habitat, and the use of insecticides and larvicides to kill mosquitoes;the deployment of physical barriers such as screening and bed nets;and the provision of medicinal drugs such as quinine, choloroquine, and artemisinin for prophylaxis and curative therapy. The book will also draw upon scientific articles and on historical and anthropological articles about malaria infections and interventions in Africa. It will explore the changing understandings of the health effects of malaria, including those about the acquisition and loss of immunity to malaria, and the changing understandings of the best ways to fight malaria in the various ecological zones of Africa. The book will discuss African malaria in the context of broad patterns and processes of social, political, cultural, and economic change in Africa, including the emergence of independent states, the impact of new orthodoxies in development policies, rapid urbanization, and demographic growth. Malaria continues to kill an estimated 1-2 million people each year, and approximately 90 percent of these deaths are in Sub-Saharan Africa. The United States Government, through the President's Malaria Initiative, is actively engaged in malaria control in Africa. This project is squarely aligned with the larger mission of the National Institutes of Health.
This project's goal is to produce an informed historical synthesis of malaria control interventions in Sub-Saharan Africa over the period 1900-2010. Malaria control, with the long-term goal of malaria eradication, is currently a major focus of massive, ongoing public health programs, including the President's Malaria Initiative. This history of malaria control efforts in Sub-Saharan Africa will provide important perspectives for those involved in contemporary campaigns to control malaria and for those who are involved in the broader field of global public health.
