Volume 1

The prevention of malaria / by Ronald Ross ; with contributions by L.O. Howard [and others].

  • Ronald Ross
Date:
1910
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The prevention of malaria / by Ronald Ross ; with contributions by L.O. Howard [and others]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    52/770 page 28
    In November 1899, R. Koch, who has given such great discoveries to pathology, added another in connection with malaria. He found in the valley of Ambawara in Java that while large numbers of the native children showed the parasites in their blood, the adults seemed to be comparatively free from them, and had obviously become partially immune. Thus in most very malarious places it is chiefly the children who suffer from the acute disease. The blood of those who survive gradually produces something which after a number of years has the power of reducing and perhaps extinguishing the parasite invasion. From this it follows that in such localities the Anophelines must become infected principally from the native children (see section 31 (9)). In the summer of 1900, P. Manson carried out an important crucial experiment. A number of Anopheles maculipennis, fed on cases of mild tertian, were brought from Italy to London, and were allowed to bite P. T. Manson there on several occasions. He developed the disease on the 13th September, the tertian parasites being found in his blood a little later. The insects were also allowed to bite G. Warren, who was similarly attacked fourteen days afterwards. At the same time L. Sambon, G. C. Low and two others lived for three of the most malarious months in one of the deadliest places in the Roman Campagna, Ostia, without contracting the disease, because they spent the nights in a hut protected by wire gauze against the entry of mosquitos. On many other occasions healthy persons have been similarly infected on the lines of my experiments with birds in July to August 1898. As already mentioned Bignami and Bastianelli infected four persons in Rome (which is itself free from malaria) in 1898-1899. Subsequently C. F. Fearnside at Rajamundri in India infected seven out of eight persons, including himself, in 1900-1901 [1901]. W. Schuffner infected himself and two others at Delhi, Sumatra, in August and September 1901, two with tertian and one with malignant
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