page_title: Globalization and disease
section_title: Malaria
hierarchical_section_title: Globalization and disease / Specific diseases / Malaria
caption_attribution_description: English: World map of past and current malaria prevalence –
context_page_description: Globalization, the flow of information, goods, capital, and people across political and geographic boundaries, allows infectious diseases to rapidly spread around the world, while also allowing the alleviation of factors such as hunger and poverty, which are key determinants of global health. The spread of diseases across wide geographic scales has increased through history. Early diseases that spread from Asia to Europe were bubonic plague, influenza of various types, and similar infectious diseases.
  In the current era of globalization, the world is more interdependent than at any other time. Efficient and inexpensive transportation has left few places inaccessible, and increased global trade in agricultural products has brought more and more people into contact with animal diseases that have subsequently jumped species barriers.
  Globalization intensified during the Age of Exploration, but trading routes had long been established between Asia and Europe, along which diseases were also transmitted. An increase in travel has helped spread diseases to natives of lands who had not previously been exposed.
context_section_description: On Nov. 6, 1880 Alphonse Laveran discovered that malaria (then called "Marsh Fever") was a protozoan parasite, and that mosquitoes carry and transmit malaria. Malaria is a protozoan infectious disease that is generally transmitted to humans by mosquitoes between dusk and dawn. The European variety, known as "vivax" after the Plasmodium vivax parasite, causes a relatively mild, yet chronically aggravating disease. The west African variety is caused by the sporozoan parasite, Plasmodium falciparum, and results in a severely debilitating and deadly disease.
  Malaria was common in parts of the world where it has now disappeared, as the vast majority of Europe (disease of African descent are particularly diffused in the Empire romain) and North America . In some parts of England, mortality due to malaria was comparable to that of sub-Saharan Africa today. Although William Shakespeare was born at the beginning of a colder period called the "Little Ice Age", he knew enough ravages of this disease to include in eight parts. Plasmodium vivax lasted until 1958 in the polders of Belgium and the Netherlands.
  In the 1500s, it was the European settlers and their slaves who probably brought malaria on the American continent (we know that Columbus was suffering from this disease before his arrival in the new land). The Spanish Jesuit missionaries saw the Indians bordering on Lake Loxa Peru used the Cinchona bark powder to treat fevers. However, there is no reference to malaria in the medical literature of the Maya or Aztecs. The use of the bark of the "fever tree" was introduced into European medicine by Jesuit missionaries whose Barbabe Cobo who experimented in 1632 and also by exports, which contributed to the precious powder also being called "Jesuit powder". A study in 2012 of thousands of genetic markers for Plasmodium falciparum samples confirmed the African origin of the parasite in South America (Europeans themselves have been affected by this disease through Africa): it borrowed from the mid-sixteenth century and the mid-nineteenth the two main roads of the slave trade, the first leading to the north of South America (Colombia) by the Spanish, the second most leading south (Brazil) by Portugueses.
  Parts of Third World countries are more affected by malaria than the rest of the world. For instance, many inhabitants of sub-Saharan Africa are affected by recurring attacks of malaria throughout their lives. In many areas of Africa, there is limited running water. The residents' use of wells and cisterns provides many sites for the breeding of mosquitoes and spread of the disease. Mosquitoes use areas of standing water like marshes, wetlands, and water drums to breed.
caption: Past and current malaria prevalence in 2009
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