The daily morning journal and courier., 1898-09-17
MALARIA AND MOSQUITOES.

Does the Pest Peddle the Disease
 Among Mankind?-Som Hard Ques-
 tions as to the Malaria Microbe An
 swered by a Theory-Where the Mos
 quito Gets Her Microbes.
 For a number of years great num- Der of skilled observers searched per- sistently for the cause of malarial fev- CT. It remained, however, for Dr. La veran, a French army surgeon, now professor at the medical school at Val de Grace, to announce in 1880 that he had discovered a parasite inside of the red blood corpuscles of patients sick of the malarial fever that was very prob ably the cause of the disease. He rec ognized that they were parasites be- longing to the lowest forms of animal life, and probably amoeba, as they showed amoeboid movements It is to be remembered that they are not bac- teria, which are the lowest forms of vegetable life, and are as different from the amoeba as a man is from tree. For several years his discovery attract ed little attention. It was finally taken up by a number of skilled microscop- ists in this and other malarial coun- tries, who have not only confirmed it, but with the aid of more powerful mi croscopes assisted in placing the dis covery upon a pretty firm foundation.
 Laveran called the parasites Oscila- ria malariae. Machiafaya and Celli, two Italian observers, suggested the term "Plasmoium malariae," and it was adopted by the profession through
 out the world. It Is now being replac-
 ed by the word haematozoa, meaning
 parasite which lives in the blood. How does the malarial parasite get into the blood of man? It has been
 claimed that it is conveyed by drinking water, but this has been pretty we'll disproved. A number of healthy per
 sons have purposely drank water from
 marshes in malarial districts without contracting the disease. and quite a good number of Italian observers have drank freely of the water from the no- toriously unhealthy Pontine marshes at Rome without i'll effe ts. Dew of mala- rial regions has also been drunk with out untoward results. Healthy men have been fed the blood of malarial pa- tients known to contain the parasite
 without producing the disease in them.
 The general opinion of the profession
 is that the haematozoa cannot exter the
 blood through the mucous membrane of the stomach or intestines, but is kill
 ed by the juices of the stomach.
 It is maintained by a number of ob- [ servers that air is the medium of infec-
 ton, but how the parasite gets into the air and floats about is not explained. It is a tender icro-organism, and so far as we know does not exist in a
 dried state. In fact, it lives but short time after removal from the body If
 it remains in a moist condition it can-
 not very we'll be taken up as dust and
 blown about in the air. It cannot fly about, hence it must stay pretty close 1 to the earth The theory of the air as
 a medium of infection is not at Il con- 1 vincing.
 Malarial fever has been given to | healthy men by injecting into them blood from a malarial patient. The | fever produced was of the same type | as that from which the sick man suf- | fered, and the blood of both patients | contains the same variety of haemato- 1 goa. For example if a healthy man is | injected with blood from malarial pa- | tient who has had fever of the-every | other day type, he will have a fever
 ever other day. It is pretty clear, then, | that in order to produce malarial fever
 in healthy man the malarial haema- tozoa must not be fed to him or blown | into his nostrils, but injected under his 1 skin. Now, well as we know the life
 history of the malarial haematozoa in | the blood of man, we know absolutely nothing of It's habits or life history out | side of the body. A vast number of l the highest trained bacteriologists, chemists and physicians have tried in
 every seeming possible way to make 1 the parasite grow outside of the body, and although an infinite variety of
 media has been employed, no one has so far succeeded. In 1894 Dr. Patrick
 Manson, an English physician, came to