Malaria in Colonial South Asia

Malaria in Colonial South Asia PDF

Author: Sheila Zurbrigg

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2019-08-28

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 1000691454

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This book highlights the role of acute hunger in malaria lethality in colonial South Asia and investigates how this understanding came to be lost in modern medical, epidemic, and historiographic thought. Using the case studies of colonial Punjab, Sri Lanka, and Bengal, it traces the loss of fundamental concepts and language of hunger in the inter-war period with the reductive application of the new specialisms of nutritional science and immunology, and a parallel loss of the distinction between infection (transmission) and morbid disease. The study locates the final demise of the ‘Human Factor’ (hunger) in malaria history within pre- and early post-WW2 international health institutions – the International Health Division of the Rockefeller Foundation and the nascent WHO’s Expert Committee on Malaria. It examines the implications of this epistemic shift for interpreting South Asian health history, and reclaims a broader understanding of common endemic infection (endemiology) as a prime driver, in the context of subsistence precarity, of epidemic mortality history and demographic change. This book will be useful to scholars and researchers of public health, social medicine and social epidemiology, imperial history, epidemic and demographic history, history of medicine, medical sociology, and sociology.

Malaria in South Asia

Malaria in South Asia PDF

Author: Rais Akhtar

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2009-12-04

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 9048133580

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Malaria is one of the most widespread and devastating infectious diseases in the world. More than half the world population residing in over 100 countries is at risk of infection from this vector-borne disease. An estimated 250–500 million mal- ial cases occur each year, resulting in nearly one million deaths, the overwhelming majority of which are children. Because of the magnitude of the associated fata- ties, development experts consider malaria a ‘silent tsunami,’ comparing its death toll to the Indian Ocean tsunami (IOT) that ravaged several countries of South and Southeast Asia on December 26, 2004. That tsunami killed some 300,000 people (including children) at once. Globally, malarial deaths account for about 9% of all childhood deaths each year. However, with malaria more than most fatal d- eases, mortality is a small fraction of morbidity. Malaria is a debilitating disease, particularly for the adult population. In addition to children, pregnant women and migrating populations are most v- nerable to malaria. Miscarriage, stillbirth, and low birth weight are common among pregnant women who are infected with this disease. Malaria manifests itself through recurrent fever and chills, with associated symptoms such as anemia and an enlarged spleen. If a person survives the disease, he or she will develop a certain degree of immunity for some years. But malaria victims are not only deprived of energy, they also face an increased risk of other diseases taking hold in the weakened body.

Epidemic Malaria and Hunger in Colonial Punjab

Epidemic Malaria and Hunger in Colonial Punjab PDF

Author: Sheila Zurbrigg

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2018-12-12

Total Pages: 382

ISBN-13: 0429758766

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This book documents the primary role of acute hunger (semi- and frank starvation) in the ‘fulminant’ malaria epidemics that repeatedly afflicted the northwest plains of British India through the first half of colonial rule. Using Punjab vital registration data and regression analysis it also tracks the marked decline in annual malaria mortality after 1908 with the control of famine, despite continuing post-monsoonal malaria transmission across the province. The study establishes a time-series of annual malaria mortality estimates for each of the 23 plains districts of colonial Punjab province between 1868 and 1947 and for the early post-Independence years (1948-60) in (East) Punjab State. It goes on to investigate the political imperatives motivating malaria policy shifts on the part of the British Raj. This work reclaims the role of hunger in Punjab malaria mortality history and, in turn, raises larger epistemic questions regarding the adequacy of modern concepts of nutrition and epidemic causation in historical and demographic analysis. Part of The Social History of Health and Medicine in South Asia series, this book will be useful to scholars and researchers of colonial history, modern history, social medicine, social anthropology and public health.

The Fever Trail

The Fever Trail PDF

Author: Mark Honigsbaum

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2003-05

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 9780312421809

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Literally Italian for "bad air," malaria once plagued Rome, tropical trade routes and colonial ventures into India and South America and the disease has no known antidote aside from the therapeutic effects of the "miraculous" quinine. This first book from journalist Honigsbaum is a rousing history of the search for febrifuge or, more specifically, the rare red cinchona tree, the bark from which quinine is derived.

Saving Lives, Buying Time

Saving Lives, Buying Time PDF

Author: Institute of Medicine

Publisher: National Academies Press

Published: 2004-09-09

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 0309165938

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For more than 50 years, low-cost antimalarial drugs silently saved millions of lives and cured billions of debilitating infections. Today, however, these drugs no longer work against the deadliest form of malaria that exists throughout the world. Malaria deaths in sub-Saharan Africaâ€"currently just over one million per yearâ€"are rising because of increased resistance to the old, inexpensive drugs. Although effective new drugs called "artemisinins" are available, they are unaffordable for the majority of the affected population, even at a cost of one dollar per course. Saving Lives, Buying Time: Economics of Malaria Drugs in an Age of Resistance examines the history of malaria treatments, provides an overview of the current drug crisis, and offers recommendations on maximizing access to and effectiveness of antimalarial drugs. The book finds that most people in endemic countries will not have access to currently effective combination treatments, which should include an artemisinin, without financing from the global community. Without funding for effective treatment, malaria mortality could double over the next 10 to 20 years and transmission will intensify.

Malarial Subjects

Malarial Subjects PDF

Author: Rohan Deb Roy

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2017-09-14

Total Pages: 349

ISBN-13: 1107172365

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This book examines how and why British imperial rule shaped scientific knowledge about malaria and its cures in nineteenth-century India. This title is also available as Open Access.

Society, Medicine and Politics in Colonial India

Society, Medicine and Politics in Colonial India PDF

Author: Biswamoy Pati

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-02-13

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13: 1351262181

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The history of medicine and disease in colonial India remains a dynamic and innovative field of research, covering many facets of health, from government policy to local therapeutics. This volume presents a selection of essays examining varied aspects of health and medicine as they relate to the political upheavals of the colonial era. These range from the micro-politics of medicine in princely states and institutions such as asylums through to the wider canvas of sanitary diplomacy as well as the meaning of modernity and modernization in the context of British rule. The volume reflects the diversity of the field and showcases exciting new scholarship from early-career researchers as well as more established scholars by bringing to light many locations and dimensions of medicine and modernity. The essays have several common themes and together offer important insights into South Asia’s experience of modernity in the years before independence. Cutting across modernity and colonialism, some of the key themes explored here include issues of race, gender, sexuality, law, mental health, famine, disease, religion, missionary medicine, medical research, tensions between and within different medical traditions and practices and India’s place in an international context. This book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of modern South Asian history, sociology, politics and anthropology as well as specialists in the history of medicine.

The Malaria Project

The Malaria Project PDF

Author: Karen M. Masterson

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2014-10-07

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 0698140133

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A fascinating and shocking historical exposé, The Malaria Project is the story of America's secret mission to combat malaria during World War II—a campaign modeled after a German project which tested experimental drugs on men gone mad from syphilis. American war planners, foreseeing the tactical need for a malaria drug, recreated the German model, then grew it tenfold. Quickly becoming the biggest and most important medical initiative of the war, the project tasked dozens of the country’s top research scientists and university labs to find a treatment to remedy half a million U.S. troops incapacitated by malaria. Spearheading the new U.S. effort was Dr. Lowell T. Coggeshall, the son of a poor Indiana farmer whose persistent drive and curiosity led him to become one of the most innovative thinkers in solving the malaria problem. He recruited private corporations, such as today's Squibb and Eli Lilly, and the nation’s best chemists out of Harvard and Johns Hopkins to make novel compounds that skilled technicians tested on birds. Giants in the field of clinical research, including the future NIH director James Shannon, then tested the drugs on mental health patients and convicted criminals—including infamous murderer Nathan Leopold. By 1943, a dozen strains of malaria brought home in the veins of sick soldiers were injected into these human guinea pigs for drug studies. After hundreds of trials and many deaths, they found their “magic bullet,” but not in a U.S. laboratory. America 's best weapon against malaria, still used today, was captured in battle from the Nazis. Called chloroquine, it went on to save more lives than any other drug in history. Karen M. Masterson, a journalist turned malaria researcher, uncovers the complete story behind this dark tale of science, medicine and war. Illuminating, riveting and surprising, The Malaria Project captures the ethical perils of seeking treatments for disease while ignoring the human condition.

Dreadful Diseases in Colonial Bengal

Dreadful Diseases in Colonial Bengal PDF

Author: Suranjan Das

Publisher: Primus Books

Published: 2021-06-21

Total Pages: 422

ISBN-13: 9789390633135

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Dreadful Diseases in Colonial Bengal is the third volume produced under the aegis of the Wellcome Trust (London) funded documentation project 'Western Medicine and Indigenous Society: History of Disease, Medicine and Public Health Policy in Colonial Eastern India, (1757-1947)'. While the first volume documented the context in which hospitals were established in Calcutta during the rule of the British East India Company, and the second analysed the trauma caused by tuberculosis in the public health system of twentieth-century India, the present volume brings together selections from official reports on cholera, malaria and smallpox-the three diseases which repeatedly struck colonial Bengal as epidemics. Its objective is to provide a useful resource for researchers, with ready entry points for reconstructing the incidence of these diseases, their mortality rates, social and economic effects as well as colonial medical interventions to contain them. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of studying epidemics that have struck human society in a historical continuum and the significance of the present collation needs to be viewed in this context. The book will be a welcome contribution to the rapidly developing field of History of Medicine.

The Oxford Handbook of the History of Medicine

The Oxford Handbook of the History of Medicine PDF

Author: Mark Jackson

Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand

Published: 2011-08-25

Total Pages: 691

ISBN-13: 0199546495

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In three sections, the Oxford Handbook of the History of Medicine celebrates the richness and variety of medical history around the world. It explore medical developments and trends in writing history according to period, place, and theme.