Vol. 24 No. 14 · 25 July 2002
pages 26-27 | 2738 words
Shivers and Sweats
Ian Glynn
- The Fever Trail: The Hunt for the Cure for Malaria by Mark Honigsbaum
Macmillan, 333 pp, £18.99, November 2001, ISBN 0 333 90185 1
Mark Honigsbaum is fascinated by fever trees. The phrase may bring to mind ‘the great, grey-green, greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever trees’. But Honigsbaum is not interested in Kipling’s trees, or in the beautiful flat-topped acacias of the Kenyan rift valley, which are called ‘fever trees’ because they grow in malarial districts. What he writes about are the many species of Cinchona that grow at high altitudes on the inaccessible eastern slopes of the Andes, in Bolivia and Peru and Ecuador and Colombia and Venezuela, whose bark is the source of quinine.
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Letters
Vol. 24 No. 17 · 5 September 2002
From Judith Rascoe
Ian Glynn ends his review of Mark Honigsbaum's The Fever Trail (LRB, 25 July) with the claim that, owing to global warming, the malaria problem is 'likely to grow worse and to spread to more temperate areas'. Most people, even in the United States, seem to have forgotten that malaria was once endemic throughout much of this temperate country. My grandmother remembered it as a plague on her riverside farm town in southern Idaho, and it was a scourge of the central Midwest – Indiana, Kentucky, Illinois, Kansas – in the 1850s. The promise of a territory free from malaria was one of the major incentives for settlement in northern states such as Minnesota. Idaho, and probably most other states, still have mosquitoes capable of carrying malaria. Heroic measures, and DDT, wiped out the disease for a few generations, but given global warming and the power of diseases to evolve beyond the reach of current treatments, we'd do well to remember that malaria is a disease that was beaten back here, not a disease that has not yet been known.
Judith Rascoe
San Francisco
